Neural Models for Key Phrase Extraction and Question Generation

Abstract

We propose a two-stage neural model to tackle question generation from documents. First, our model estimates the probability that word sequences in a document are ones that a human would pick when selecting candidate answers by training a neural key-phrase extractor on the answers in a question-answering corpus. Predicted key phrases then act as target answers and condition a sequence-tosequence question-generation model with a copy mechanism. Empirically, our keyphrase extraction model significantly outperforms an entity-tagging baseline and existing rule-based approaches. We further demonstrate that our question generation system formulates fluent, answerable questions from key phrases. This twostage system could be used to augment or generate reading comprehension datasets, which may be leveraged to improve machine reading systems or in educational settings.