Multi-hop Question Generation without Supporting Fact Information

Abstract

Question generation is the parallel task of question answering, where given an input context and optionally, an answer, the goal is to generate a relevant and fluent natural language question. Although recent works on question generation have experienced success by utilizing sequence-to-sequence models, there is a need for question generation models to handle increasingly complex input contexts with the goal of producing increasingly elaborate questions. Multi-hop question generation is a more challenging task that aims to generate questions by connecting multiple facts from multiple input contexts. In this work we apply a transformer model to the task of multi-hop question generation, without utilizing any sentence-level supporting fact information. We utilize concepts that have proven effective in single-hop question generation, including a copy mechanism and placeholder tokens. We evaluate our model's performance on the HotpotQA dataset using automated evaluation metrics and human evaluation, and show an improvement over the previous works.