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Generating Diverse and Consistent QA pairs from Contexts with Information-Maximizing Hierarchical Conditional VAEs

28 May 2020ACL 2020 6arXiv:2005.13837archive 2025-07-28

Dong Bok Lee, Seanie Lee, Woo Tae Jeong, Donghwan Kim, Sung Ju Hwang

One of the most crucial challenges in question answering (QA) is the scarcity of labeled data, since it is costly to obtain question-answer (QA) pairs for a target text domain with human annotation. An alternative approach to tackle the problem is to use automatically generated QA pairs from either the problem context or from large amount of unstructured texts (e.g. Wikipedia). In this work, we propose a hierarchical conditional variational autoencoder (HCVAE) for generating QA pairs given unstructured texts as contexts, while maximizing the mutual information between generated QA pairs to ensure their consistency. We validate our Information Maximizing Hierarchical Conditional Variational AutoEncoder (Info-HCVAE) on several benchmark datasets by evaluating the performance of the QA model (BERT-base) using only the generated QA pairs (QA-based evaluation) or by using both the generated and human-labeled pairs (semi-supervised learning) for training, against state-of-the-art baseline models. The results show that our model obtains impressive performance gains over all baselines on both tasks, using only a fraction of data for training.

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batch_to_device seanie12/Info-HCVAE/vae/utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 7cef89edf29127bc · report
cal_attn seanie12/Info-HCVAE/vae/models.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 1f734017a6f68175 · report
convert_examples_to_features seanie12/Info-HCVAE/qa-eval/squad_utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 72c5000d831f12e0 · report
convert_examples_to_features_answer_id seanie12/Info-HCVAE/qa-eval/squad_utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 1e2aae97388cfe6e · report
convert_examples_to_harv_features seanie12/Info-HCVAE/qa-eval/squad_utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 4481bd2f1ff50f5b · report
cook_refs seanie12/Info-HCVAE/vae/qgevalcap/cider/cider_scorer.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 5172aba957a32d9e · report
cook_test seanie12/Info-HCVAE/vae/qgevalcap/cider/cider_scorer.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 90a4bcbf05586ff3 · report
get_linear_schedule_with_warmup seanie12/Info-HCVAE/qa-eval/trainer.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · a3c458ae06a14711 · report
gumbel_softmax seanie12/Info-HCVAE/vae/models.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 7b8c9c000eba3141 · report
post_process seanie12/Info-HCVAE/vae/translate.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 845c524066f993b4 · report
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user_friendly_time seanie12/Info-HCVAE/qa-eval/utils.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 0a7669f48a1dc3a1 · report

Tasks

Question AnsweringQuestion GenerationQuestion-Answer-Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Question Generation Natural Questions Info-HCVAE QAE 37.18 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation Natural Questions Info-HCVAE R-QAE 29.39 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation Natural Questions HCVAE QAE 31.45 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation Natural Questions HCVAE R-QAE 32.78 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation SQuAD Info-HCVAE QAE 71.18 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation SQuAD Info-HCVAE R-QAE 38.8 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation SQuAD HCVAE QAE 69.46 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation SQuAD HCVAE R-QAE 37.57 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation TriviaQA Info-HCVAE QAE 35.45 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation TriviaQA Info-HCVAE R-QAE 21.65 #1 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation TriviaQA HCVAE QAE 30.2 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Question Generation TriviaQA HCVAE R-QAE 34.41 #2 of 2 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.

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