The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic accentuated the need for access to biomedical literature to answer timely and disease-specific questions. During the early days of the pandemic, one of the biggest challenges we faced was the lack of peer-reviewed biomedical articles on COVID-19 that could be used to train machine learning models for question answering (QA). In this paper, we explore the roles weak supervision and data augmentation play in training deep neural network QA models. First, we investigate whether labels generated automatically from the structured abstracts of scholarly papers using an information retrieval algorithm, BM25, provide a weak supervision signal to train an extractive QA model. We also curate new QA pairs using information retrieval techniques, guided by the clinicaltrials.gov schema and the structured abstracts of articles, in the absence of annotated data from biomedical domain experts. Furthermore, we explore augmenting the training data of a deep neural network model with linguistic features from external sources such as lexical databases to account for variations in word morphology and meaning. To better utilize our training data, we apply curriculum learning to domain adaptation, fine-tuning our QA model in stages based on characteristics of the QA pairs. We evaluate our methods in the context of QA models at the core of a system to answer questions about COVID-19.

Precise answers are extracted from a text for a given input question in a question answering system. Marathi question answering system is created in recent studies by using ontology, rule base and machine learning based approaches. Recently transformer models and transfer learning approaches are used to solve question answering challenges. In this paper we investigate different transformer models for creating a reading comprehension-based Marathi question answering system. We have experimented on different pretrained Marathi language multilingual and monolingual models like Multilingual Representations for Indian Languages (MuRIL), MahaBERT, Indic Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (IndicBERT) and fine-tuned it on a Marathi reading comprehension-based data set. We got the best accuracy in a MuRIL multilingual model with an EM score of 0.64 and F1 score of 0.74 by fine tuning the model on the Marathi dataset.

Medical Visual Question Answering (Medical-VQA) aims to to answer clinical questions regarding radiology images, assisting doctors with decision-making options. Nevertheless, current Medical-VQA models learn cross-modal representations through residing vision and texture encoders in dual separate spaces, which lead to indirect semantic alignment. In this paper, we propose UnICLAM, a Unified and Interpretable Medical-VQA model through Contrastive Representation Learning with Adversarial Masking. Specifically, to learn an aligned image-text representation, we first establish a unified dual-stream pre-training structure with the gradually soft-parameter sharing strategy. Technically, the proposed strategy learns a constraint for the vision and texture encoders to be close in a same space, which is gradually loosened as the higher number of layers. Moreover, for grasping the unified semantic representation, we extend the adversarial masking data augmentation to the contrastive representation learning of vision and text in a unified manner. Concretely, while the encoder training minimizes the distance between original and masking samples, the adversarial masking module keeps adversarial learning to conversely maximize the distance. Furthermore, we also intuitively take a further exploration to the unified adversarial masking augmentation model, which improves the potential ante-hoc interpretability with remarkable performance and efficiency. Experimental results on VQA-RAD and SLAKE public benchmarks demonstrate that UnICLAM outperforms existing 11 state-of-the-art Medical-VQA models. More importantly, we make an additional discussion about the performance of UnICLAM in diagnosing heart failure, verifying that UnICLAM exhibits superior few-shot adaption performance in practical disease diagnosis.

The use of question-based activities (QBAs) is wide-spread in education, traditionally forming an integral part of the learning and assessment process. In this paper, we design and evaluate an automated question generation tool for formative and summative assessment in schools. We present an expert survey of one hundred and four teachers, demonstrating the need for automated generation of QBAs, as a tool that can significantly reduce the workload of teachers and facilitate personalized learning experiences. Leveraging the recent advancements in generative AI, we then present a modular framework employing transformer based language models for automatic generation of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) from textual content. The presented solution, with distinct modules for question generation, correct answer prediction, and distractor formulation, enables us to evaluate different language models and generation techniques. Finally, we perform an extensive quantitative and qualitative evaluation, demonstrating trade-offs in the use of different techniques and models.

When caregivers ask open--ended questions to motivate dialogue with children, it facilitates the child's reading comprehension skills.Although there is scope for use of technological tools, referred here as "intelligent tutoring systems", to scaffold this process, it is currently unclear whether existing intelligent systems that generate human--language like questions is beneficial. Additionally, training data used in the development of these automated question generation systems is typically sourced without attention to demographics, but people with different cultural backgrounds may ask different questions. As a part of a broader project to design an intelligent reading support app for Latinx children, we crowdsourced questions from Latinx caregivers and noncaregivers as well as caregivers and noncaregivers from other demographics. We examine variations in question--asking within this dataset mediated by individual, cultural, and contextual factors. We then design a system that automatically extracts templates from this data to generate open--ended questions that are representative of those asked by Latinx caregivers.

Previous methods on knowledge base question generation (KBQG) primarily focus on enhancing the quality of a single generated question. Recognizing the remarkable paraphrasing ability of humans, we contend that diverse texts should convey the same semantics through varied expressions. The above insights make diversifying question generation an intriguing task, where the first challenge is evaluation metrics for diversity. Current metrics inadequately assess the above diversity since they calculate the ratio of unique n-grams in the generated question itself, which leans more towards measuring duplication rather than true diversity. Accordingly, we devise a new diversity evaluation metric, which measures the diversity among top-k generated questions for each instance while ensuring their relevance to the ground truth. Clearly, the second challenge is how to enhance diversifying question generation. To address this challenge, we introduce a dual model framework interwoven by two selection strategies to generate diverse questions leveraging external natural questions. The main idea of our dual framework is to extract more diverse expressions and integrate them into the generation model to enhance diversifying question generation. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks for KBQG demonstrate that our proposed approach generates highly diverse questions and improves the performance of question answering tasks.

Conventional automatic evaluation metrics, such as BLEU and ROUGE, developed for natural language generation (NLG) tasks, are based on measuring the n-gram overlap between the generated and reference text. These simple metrics may be insufficient for more complex tasks, such as question generation (QG), which requires generating questions that are answerable by the reference answers. Developing a more sophisticated automatic evaluation metric, thus, remains as an urgent problem in QG research. This work proposes a Prompting-based Metric on ANswerability (PMAN), a novel automatic evaluation metric to assess whether the generated questions are answerable by the reference answers for the QG tasks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that its evaluation results are reliable and align with human evaluations. We further apply our metric to evaluate the performance of QG models, which shows our metric complements conventional metrics. Our implementation of a ChatGPT-based QG model achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in generating answerable questions.

Evaluation of QA systems is very challenging and expensive, with the most reliable approach being human annotations of correctness of answers for questions. Recent works (AVA, BEM) have shown that transformer LM encoder based similarity metrics transfer well for QA evaluation, but they are limited by the usage of a single correct reference answer. We propose a new evaluation metric: SQuArE (Sentence-level QUestion AnsweRing Evaluation), using multiple reference answers (combining multiple correct and incorrect references) for sentence-form QA. We evaluate SQuArE on both sentence-level extractive (Answer Selection) and generative (GenQA) QA systems, across multiple academic and industrial datasets, and show that it outperforms previous baselines and obtains the highest correlation with human annotations.

Question answering on tabular data (a.k.a TableQA), which aims at generating answers to questions grounded on a provided table, has gained significant attention recently. Prior work primarily produces concise factual responses through information extraction from individual or limited table cells, lacking the ability to reason across diverse table cells. Yet, the realm of free-form TableQA, which demands intricate strategies for selecting relevant table cells and the sophisticated integration and inference of discrete data fragments, remains mostly unexplored. To this end, this paper proposes a generalized three-stage approach: Table-to- Graph conversion and cell localizing, external knowledge retrieval, and the fusion of table and text (called TAG-QA), to address the challenge of inferring long free-form answers in generative TableQA. In particular, TAG-QA (1) locates relevant table cells using a graph neural network to gather intersecting cells between relevant rows and columns, (2) leverages external knowledge from Wikipedia, and (3) generates answers by integrating both tabular data and natural linguistic information. Experiments showcase the superior capabilities of TAG-QA in generating sentences that are both faithful and coherent, particularly when compared to several state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, TAG-QA surpasses the robust pipeline-based baseline TAPAS by 17% and 14% in terms of BLEU-4 and PARENT F-score, respectively. Furthermore, TAG-QA outperforms the end-to-end model T5 by 16% and 12% on BLEU-4 and PARENT F-score, respectively.

Recent years have witnessed the success of question answering (QA), especially its potential to be a foundation paradigm for tackling diverse NLP tasks. However, obtaining sufficient data to build an effective and stable QA system still remains an open problem. For this problem, we introduce an iterative bootstrapping framework for QA data augmentation (named QASnowball), which can iteratively generate large-scale high-quality QA data based on a seed set of supervised examples. Specifically, QASnowball consists of three modules, an answer extractor to extract core phrases in unlabeled documents as candidate answers, a question generator to generate questions based on documents and candidate answers, and a QA data filter to filter out high-quality QA data. Moreover, QASnowball can be self-enhanced by reseeding the seed set to fine-tune itself in different iterations, leading to continual improvements in the generation quality. We conduct experiments in the high-resource English scenario and the medium-resource Chinese scenario, and the experimental results show that the data generated by QASnowball can facilitate QA models: (1) training models on the generated data achieves comparable results to using supervised data, and (2) pre-training on the generated data and fine-tuning on supervised data can achieve better performance. Our code and generated data will be released to advance further work.