Papers › Paragraph-level Neural Question Generation with Maxout Pointer and Gated...

Paragraph-level Neural Question Generation with Maxout Pointer and Gated Self-attention Networks

1 Oct 2018EMNLP 2018 10archive 2025-07-28

Yao Zhao, Xiaochuan Ni, Yuanyuan Ding, Qifa Ke

Question generation, the task of automatically creating questions that can be answered by a certain span of text within a given passage, is important for question-answering and conversational systems in digital assistants such as Alexa, Cortana, Google Assistant and Siri. Recent sequence to sequence neural models have outperformed previous rule-based systems. Existing models mainly focused on using one or two sentences as the input. Long text has posed challenges for sequence to sequence neural models in question generation {--} worse performances were reported if using the whole paragraph (with multiple sentences) as the input. In reality, however, it often requires the whole paragraph as context in order to generate high quality questions. In this paper, we propose a maxout pointer mechanism with gated self-attention encoder to address the challenges of processing long text inputs for question generation. With sentence-level inputs, our model outperforms previous approaches with either sentence-level or paragraph-level inputs. Furthermore, our model can effectively utilize paragraphs as inputs, pushing the state-of-the-art result from 13.9 to 16.3 (BLEU{\_}4).

PaperPDFCode

Code

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

Question AnsweringQuestion GenerationQuestion-GenerationReading ComprehensionSentenceText Generation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

BiLSTMLSTMMaxoutSigmoid ActivationTanh Activation

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