Papers › Engage the Public: Poll Question Generation for Social Media Posts

Engage the Public: Poll Question Generation for Social Media Posts

1 Aug 2021ACL 2021 5archive 2025-07-28

Zexin Lu, Keyang Ding, Yuji Zhang, Jing Li, Baolin Peng, Lemao Liu

This paper presents a novel task to generate poll questions for social media posts. It offers an easy way to hear the voice from the public and learn from their feelings to important social topics. While most related work tackles formal languages (e.g., exam papers), we generate poll questions for short and colloquial social media messages exhibiting severe data sparsity. To deal with that, we propose to encode user comments and discover latent topics therein as contexts. They are then incorporated into a sequence-to-sequence (S2S) architecture for question generation and its extension with dual decoders to additionally yield poll choices (answers). For experiments, we collect a large-scale Chinese dataset from Sina Weibo containing over 20K polls. The results show that our model outperforms the popular S2S models without exploiting topics from comments and the dual decoder design can further benefit the prediction of both questions and answers. Human evaluations further exhibit our superiority in yielding high-quality polls helpful to draw user engagements.

PaperPDFCode

Code

polyusmart/poll-question-generation officialmentioned in paperpytorch report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Answer GenerationDecoderPoll GenerationQuestion GenerationQuestion-Generation

Datasets

Introduced by this paper, per the archive.

WeiboPolls

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Answer Generation WeiboPolls Dual Dec BLEU-1 26.55 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Answer Generation WeiboPolls Dual Dec BLEU-3 8.65 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Answer Generation WeiboPolls Dual Dec ROUGE-1 31.72 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Answer Generation WeiboPolls Dual Dec ROUGE-L 29.54 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Poll Generation WeiboPolls Dual Dec BLEU-1 29.41 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Poll Generation WeiboPolls Dual Dec BLEU-3 8.84 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Poll Generation WeiboPolls Dual Dec ROUGE-1 34.98 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Poll Generation WeiboPolls Dual Dec ROUGE-L 32.84 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation WeiboPolls Dual Dec BLEU-1 32.27 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation WeiboPolls Dual Dec BLEU-3 9.04 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation WeiboPolls Dual Dec ROUGE-1 38.24 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation WeiboPolls Dual Dec ROUGE-L 36.14 #3 of 3 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections