The scarcity and high cost of high-quality question-answering (QA) datasets hinder supervised fine-tuning (SFT) for domain-specific large language models (LLMs). To address this, we introduce D-SCoRE, a training-free pipeline that utilizes LLMs and prompt engineering to produce diverse, high-quality QA datasets from arbitrary textual sources. D-SCoRE integrates $\textbf{D}$ocument-centric processing, $\textbf{S}$egmentation, $\textbf{Co}$T $\textbf{R}$easoning, and structured $\textbf{E}$xport to generate QA-COT datasets tailored for domain-aware SFT. Multi-dimensional control mechanisms, such as semantic role transformation, question type balancing, and counterfactual materials, enhance diversity and relevance, overcoming limitations of existing QA generation. LLMs fine-tuned on D-SCoRE-generated QA datasets, and human-annotated QA datasets (SQuAD, Covid-QA) are evaluated on SQuADShifts and Covid-QA test sets, with D-SCoRE outperforming across most domains. D-SCoRE generates six QA-CoT pairs with four-option counterfactual materials per 100-200-word text in 90 seconds using an 8B LLM on consumer-grade hardware. Its simplicity and scalability enable efficient QA generation and high-performance fine-tuning across domains.

Despite advancements in state-of-the-art models and information retrieval techniques, current systems still struggle to handle temporal information and to correctly answer detailed questions about past events. In this paper, we investigate the impact of temporal characteristics of answers in Question Answering (QA) by exploring several simple answer selection techniques. Our findings emphasize the role of temporal features in selecting the most relevant answers from diachronic document collections and highlight differences between explicit and implicit temporal questions.

Temporal question answering (QA) involves time constraints, with phrases such as "... in 2019" or "... before COVID". In the former, time is an explicit condition, in the latter it is implicit. State-of-the-art methods have limitations along three dimensions. First, with neural inference, time constraints are merely soft-matched, giving room to invalid or inexplicable answers. Second, questions with implicit time are poorly supported. Third, answers come from a single source: either a knowledge base (KB) or a text corpus. We propose a temporal QA system that addresses these shortcomings. First, it enforces temporal constraints for faithful answering with tangible evidence. Second, it properly handles implicit questions. Third, it operates over heterogeneous sources, covering KB, text and web tables in a unified manner. The method has three stages: (i) understanding the question and its temporal conditions, (ii) retrieving evidence from all sources, and (iii) faithfully answering the question. As implicit questions are sparse in prior benchmarks, we introduce a principled method for generating diverse questions. Experiments show superior performance over a suite of baselines.

Question Generation (QG) is a task within Natural Language Processing (NLP) that involves automatically generating questions given an input, typically composed of a text and a target answer. Recent work on QG aims to control the type of generated questions so that they meet educational needs. A remarkable example of controllability in educational QG is the generation of questions underlying certain narrative elements, e.g., causal relationship, outcome resolution, or prediction. This study aims to enrich controllability in QG by introducing a new guidance attribute: question explicitness. We propose to control the generation of explicit and implicit (wh)-questions from childrenfriendly stories. We show preliminary evidence of controlling QG via question explicitness alone and simultaneously with another target attribute: the question's narrative element.