# Consistency Training by Synthetic Question Generation for Conversational Question Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11109 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.11109/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Apr 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07042/) (2018)
- [QuAC : Question Answering in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.07036/) (2018)
- [BERT with History Answer Embedding for Conversational Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05412/) (2019)
- [GraphFlow: Exploiting Conversation Flow with Graph Neural Networks for Conversational Machine Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00059/) (2019)
- [FlowQA: Grasping Flow in History for Conversational Machine Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.06683/) (2018)
- [Attentive History Selection for Conversational Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09456/) (2019)
- [Learn to Resolve Conversational Dependency: A Consistency Training Framework for Conversational Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11575/) (2021)
- [ChainCQG: Flow-Aware Conversational Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02864/) (2021)
- [Ditch the Gold Standard: Re-evaluating Conversational Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08812/) (2021)
- [Reinforced Dynamic Reasoning for Conversational Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.12667/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [BioMol-MQA: A Multi-Modal Question Answering Dataset For LLM Reasoning Over Bio-Molecular Interactions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05766/) (2025)
- [Explainable Semantic Text Relations: A Question-Answering Framework for Comparing Document Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08304/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Efficiently modeling historical information is a critical component in addressing user queries within a conversational question-answering (QA) context, as historical context plays a vital role in clarifying the user's questions. However, irrelevant history induces noise in the reasoning process, especially for those questions with a considerable historical context. In our novel model-agnostic approach, referred to as CoTaH (Consistency-Trained augmented History), we augment the historical information with synthetic questions and subsequently employ consistency training to train a model that utilizes both real and augmented historical data to implicitly make the reasoning robust to irrelevant history. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first instance of research using question generation as a form of data augmentation to model conversational QA settings. By citing a common modeling error prevalent in previous research, we introduce a new baseline model and compare our model's performance against it, demonstrating an improvement in results, particularly when dealing with questions that include a substantial amount of historical context. The source code can be found on our GitHub page.