Powerful generative models have led to recent progress in question generation (QG). However, it is difficult to measure advances in QG research since there are no standardized resources that allow a uniform comparison among approaches. In this paper, we introduce QG-Bench, a multilingual and multidomain benchmark for QG that unifies existing question answering datasets by converting them to a standard QG setting. It includes general-purpose datasets such as SQuAD for English, datasets from ten domains and two styles, as well as datasets in eight different languages. Using QG-Bench as a reference, we perform an extensive analysis of the capabilities of language models for the task. First, we propose robust QG baselines based on fine-tuning generative language models. Then, we complement automatic evaluation based on standard metrics with an extensive manual evaluation, which in turn sheds light on the difficulty of evaluating QG models. Finally, we analyse both the domain adaptability of these models as well as the effectiveness of multilingual models in languages other than English. QG-Bench is released along with the fine-tuned models presented in the paper https://github.com/asahi417/lm-question-generation, which are also available as a demo https://autoqg.net/.

Open-Domain Generative Question Answering has achieved impressive performance in English by combining document-level retrieval with answer generation. These approaches, which we refer to as GenQA, can generate complete sentences, effectively answering both factoid and non-factoid questions. In this paper, we extend GenQA to the multilingual and cross-lingual settings. For this purpose, we first introduce GenTyDiQA, an extension of the TyDiQA dataset with well-formed and complete answers for Arabic, Bengali, English, Japanese, and Russian. Based on GenTyDiQA, we design a cross-lingual generative model that produces full-sentence answers by exploiting passages written in multiple languages, including languages different from the question. Our cross-lingual generative system outperforms answer sentence selection baselines for all 5 languages and monolingual generative pipelines for three out of five languages studied.

Existing metrics for evaluating the quality of automatically generated questions such as BLEU, ROUGE, BERTScore, and BLEURT compare the reference and predicted questions, providing a high score when there is a considerable lexical overlap or semantic similarity between the candidate and the reference questions. This approach has two major shortcomings. First, we need expensive human-provided reference questions. Second, it penalises valid questions that may not have high lexical or semantic similarity to the reference questions. In this paper, we propose a new metric, RQUGE, based on the answerability of the candidate question given the context. The metric consists of a question-answering and a span scorer module, in which we use pre-trained models from the existing literature, and therefore, our metric can be used without further training. We show that RQUGE has a higher correlation with human judgment without relying on the reference question. RQUGE is shown to be significantly more robust to several adversarial corruptions. Additionally, we illustrate that we can significantly improve the performance of QA models on out-of-domain datasets by fine-tuning on the synthetic data generated by a question generation model and re-ranked by RQUGE.

我们介绍了Godel（接地开放对话语言模型），这是对话框的大型预训练的语言模型。与诸如Dialogpt之类的早期模型相比，Godel利用了一个新的扎根预训练阶段，旨在更好地支持将Godel适应广泛的下游对话框任务，这些任务需要当前对话外部的信息（例如，数据库或文档）到产生良好的回应。针对一系列基准测试的实验，这些基准涵盖了面向任务的对话框，对话质量质量检查和接地的开放式对话框，表明Godel在几次以上的微调设置中优于最先进的预训练的对话模型，就人类和自动评估。我们评估方法的一个新颖特征是引入了一个效用概念，该概念除了其交流特征（内在评估）外，还评估了响应的有用性（外部评估）。我们表明，外部评估提供了改进的通道间一致性和与自动指标的相关性。代码和数据处理脚本公开可用。

一种有效的横向传输方法是在一种语言中微调在监督数据集上的双语或多语言模型，并以零拍方式在另一种语言上进行评估。在培训时间或推理时间翻译例子也是可行的替代方案。然而，存在与文献中很少有关的这些方法相关的成本。在这项工作中，我们在其有效性（例如，准确性），开发和部署成本方面分析交叉语言方法，以及推理时间的延迟。我们的三个任务的实验表明最好的交叉方法是高度任务依赖性的。最后，通过结合零射和翻译方法，我们在这项工作中使用的三个数据集中实现了最先进的。基于这些结果，我们对目标语言手动标记的培训数据有所了解。代码和翻译的数据集可在https://github.com/unicamp-dl/cross-lingsual-analysis上获得

实际一致性是实际设置中文本摘要模型的基本质量。在评估此维度的现有工作可以大致分为两行研究，基于征收的指标和问题应答（QA）的指标。然而，最近作品中提出的不同的实验设置导致对比的结论是哪个范例表现最佳。在这项工作中，我们进行了广泛的征集和基于QA的指标的比较，致力于仔细选择基于QA的度量的组件对于性能至关重要。在那些见解中，我们提出了一个优化的公制，我们称之为QAFacteval，这导致了对夏季事实一致性基准的基于QA的度量标准的平均平均平均改进。我们的解决方案提高了基于最佳的基于范围的公制，并在该基准测试中实现了最先进的性能。此外，我们发现基于QA和基于征求的度量提供了互补信号，并将两者组合成单个学习的度量，以进一步提升。通过定性和定量分析，我们将问题生成和可应答性分类视为基于QA的度量的未来工作的两个关键组成部分。

The General QA field has been developing the methodology referencing the Stanford Question answering dataset (SQuAD) as the significant benchmark. However, compiling factual questions is accompanied by time- and labour-consuming annotation, limiting the training data's potential size. We present the WikiOmnia dataset, a new publicly available set of QA-pairs and corresponding Russian Wikipedia article summary sections, composed with a fully automated generative pipeline. The dataset includes every available article from Wikipedia for the Russian language. The WikiOmnia pipeline is available open-source and is also tested for creating SQuAD-formatted QA on other domains, like news texts, fiction, and social media. The resulting dataset includes two parts: raw data on the whole Russian Wikipedia (7,930,873 QA pairs with paragraphs for ruGPT-3 XL and 7,991,040 QA pairs with paragraphs for ruT5-large) and cleaned data with strict automatic verification (over 160,000 QA pairs with paragraphs for ruGPT-3 XL and over 3,400,000 QA pairs with paragraphs for ruT5-large).

本文探讨了提高语言模型的零次学习能力的简单方法。我们表明，指令调整 - 通过对说明书中所述的任务集合微调语言模型 - 大幅提升零射门上看不见任务中的表现。我们采取预训练的语言模型和指令调整它通过自然语言指令模板语言表达了60NLP任务137B参数。我们评估这种指令调整模型，我们称之为FLAN，在看不见的任务类型。FLAN显着改善其未修饰的对应的性能和超过25的20个任务，我们评估零射门175BGPT-3。FLAN甚至GPT-3通过在安利，RTE，BoolQ，AI2-ARC，OpenbookQA和StoryCloze大比分胜过几拍。消融研究显示任务和模型的规模，这个数字是指令调整取得成功的关键组成部分。

Large pre-trained language models have recently enabled open-ended generation frameworks (e.g., prompt-to-text NLG) to tackle a variety of tasks going beyond the traditional data-to-text generation. While this framework is more general, it is under-specified and often leads to a lack of controllability restricting their real-world usage. We propose a new grounded keys-to-text generation task: the task is to generate a factual description about an entity given a set of guiding keys, and grounding passages. To address this task, we introduce a new dataset, called EntDeGen. Inspired by recent QA-based evaluation measures, we propose an automatic metric, MAFE, for factual correctness of generated descriptions. Our EntDescriptor model is equipped with strong rankers to fetch helpful passages and generate entity descriptions. Experimental result shows a good correlation (60.14) between our proposed metric and human judgments of factuality. Our rankers significantly improved the factual correctness of generated descriptions (15.95% and 34.51% relative gains in recall and precision). Finally, our ablation study highlights the benefit of combining keys and groundings.

在这项工作中，我们证明了多种语的大规模序列到序列（SEQ2SEQ）模型，该模型是通过Denoising和因果语言建模（CLM）任务的混合物进行训练的，比仅解码器模型更有效地进行了效率的学习者在各种任务上。特别是，我们培训了一个名为Alexa教师模型（Alexatm 20b）的200亿个参数多语言SEQ2SEQ模型，并表明它在1-Shot摘要任务上实现了最先进的（SOTA）性能，超过了更大的540B PALM DOPODER模型。 Alexatm 20b还可以在1-Shot Machine翻译中实现SOTA，尤其是对于低资源语言，几乎所有语言对（阿拉伯语，英语，法语，德语，德语，印地语，意大利语，日语，以及flores-101数据集上的泰卢固语）。我们还显示了零拍设置，AlexATM 20B在SuperGlue和SqueadV2数据集上的表现优于GPT3（175B），并在XNLI，XCOPA，PAWS-X和XWINOGRAD等多语言任务上提供SOTA性能。总体而言，我们的结果为SEQ2SEQ模型提供了一个令人信服的案例，作为大型语言模型（LLM）培训的仅解码器模型的强大替代方法。

Question Answering (QA) is a growing area of research, often used to facilitate the extraction of information from within documents. State-of-the-art QA models are usually pre-trained on domain-general corpora like Wikipedia and thus tend to struggle on out-of-domain documents without fine-tuning. We demonstrate that synthetic domain-specific datasets can be generated easily using domain-general models, while still providing significant improvements to QA performance. We present two new tools for this task: A flexible pipeline for validating the synthetic QA data and training downstream models on it, and an online interface to facilitate human annotation of this generated data. Using this interface, crowdworkers labelled 1117 synthetic QA pairs, which we then used to fine-tune downstream models and improve domain-specific QA performance by 8.75 F1.

有关应答数据集和模型的研究在研究界中获得了很多关注。其中许多人释放了自己的问题应答数据集以及模型。我们在该研究领域看到了巨大的进展。本调查的目的是识别，总结和分析许多研究人员释放的现有数据集，尤其是在非英语数据集以及研究代码和评估指标等资源中。在本文中，我们审查了问题应答数据集，这些数据集可以以法语，德语，日语，中文，阿拉伯语，俄语以及多语言和交叉的问答数据集进行英语。

查询聚焦的文本摘要（QFTS）任务旨在构建基于给定查询的文本文档摘要的构建系统。解决此任务的关键挑战是缺乏培训摘要模型的大量标记数据。在本文中，我们通过探索一系列域适应技术来解决这一挑战。鉴于最近在广泛的自然语言处理任务中进行预先接受的变压器模型的成功，我们利用此类模型为单文档和多文件方案的QFTS任务产生抽象摘要。对于域适应，我们使用预先训练的变压器的摘要模型应用了各种技术，包括转移学习，弱监督学习和远程监督。六个数据集的广泛实验表明，我们所提出的方法非常有效地为QFTS任务产生抽象摘要，同时在一组自动和人类评估指标上设置新的最先进的结果。

In this work, we introduce IndicXTREME, a benchmark consisting of nine diverse tasks covering 18 languages from the Indic sub-continent belonging to four different families. Across languages and tasks, IndicXTREME contains a total of 103 evaluation sets, of which 51 are new contributions to the literature. To maintain high quality, we only use human annotators to curate or translate\footnote{for IndicXParaphrase, where an automatic translation system is used, a second human verification and correction step is done.} our datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first effort toward creating a standard benchmark for Indic languages that aims to test the zero-shot capabilities of pretrained language models. We also release IndicCorp v2, an updated and much larger version of IndicCorp that contains 20.9 billion tokens in 24 languages. We pretrain IndicBERT v2 on IndicCorp v2 and evaluate it on IndicXTREME to show that it outperforms existing multilingual language models such as XLM-R and MuRIL.

人类在对话中提出的问题通常包含上下文依赖性，即对先前对话转弯的明确或隐式引用。这些依赖性采用核心发挥的形式（例如，通过代词使用）或椭圆形，并且可以使自动化系统的理解难以理解。促进对问题的理解和后续治疗方法的一种方法是将其重写为不受欢迎的形式，即可以理解的形式而没有对话性上下文。我们提出了Coqar，Coqar是一种语料库，其中包含$ 4.5 $ k的对话中的对话询问数据集COQA，总计$ 53 $ K的后续提问 - 答案对。每个原始问题都在至少2个脱离台面重写中手动注释。 COQAR可用于监督三个任务的监督：问题释义，问题重写和会话问题回答。为了评估Coqar重写的质量，我们进行了几项实验，包括培训和评估这三个任务的模型。我们的结果支持以下想法：问题重写可以用作问题回答模型的预处理步骤，从而提高其性能。

虽然考试风格的问题是一家提供各种目的的基本型教育工具，但有问题的手动构建是一个复杂的过程，需要培训，经验和资源。为减少与人工建设相关的开支并满足不需要持续供应新问题，可以使用自动问题（QG）技术。但是，与自动问题应答（QA）相比，QG是一个更具挑战性的任务。在这项工作中，我们在QA，QG的多任务设置中微调多语言T5（MT5）变压器，并使用土耳其QA DataSet回答提取任务。据我们所知，这是第一个尝试从土耳其语文本执行自动文本到文本问题的学术工作。评估结果表明，拟议的多任务设置达到了最先进的土耳其语问题应答和问题绩效，而不是TQuadv1，TQuadv2数据集和XQuad土耳其分裂。源代码和预先训练的模型可在https://github.com/obss/turkish-question-generation中获得。

Fine-tuned language models use greedy decoding to answer reading comprehension questions with relative success. However, this approach does not ensure that the answer is a span in the given passage, nor does it guarantee that it is the most probable one. Does greedy decoding actually perform worse than an algorithm that does adhere to these properties? To study the performance and optimality of greedy decoding, we present exact-extract, a decoding algorithm that efficiently finds the most probable answer span in the context. We compare the performance of T5 with both decoding algorithms on zero-shot and few-shot extractive question answering. When no training examples are available, exact-extract significantly outperforms greedy decoding. However, greedy decoding quickly converges towards the performance of exact-extract with the introduction of a few training examples, becoming more extractive and increasingly likelier to generate the most probable span as the training set grows. We also show that self-supervised training can bias the model towards extractive behavior, increasing performance in the zero-shot setting without resorting to annotated examples. Overall, our results suggest that pretrained language models are so good at adapting to extractive question answering, that it is often enough to fine-tune on a small training set for the greedy algorithm to emulate the optimal decoding strategy.

我们介绍了MTG，这是一套新的基准套件，用于培训和评估多语言文本生成。它是具有最大人类通知数据（400K）的第一次传播的多语言多路文本生成数据集。它包括五种语言（英语，德语，法语，西班牙语和中文）的四代任务（故事产生，问题生成，标题生成和文本摘要）。Multiway设置可以启用跨语言和任务的模型测试知识传输功能。使用MTG，我们从不同方面训练和分析了几种流行的多语言生成模型。我们的基准套件通过更多的人为宣传的并行数据促进了模型性能增强。它提供了各种一代方案的全面评估。代码和数据可在\ url {https://github.com/zide05/mtg}上获得。

Precisely assessing the progress in natural language generation (NLG) tasks is challenging, and human evaluation to establish a preference in a model's output over another is often necessary. However, human evaluation is usually costly, difficult to reproduce, and non-reusable. In this paper, we propose a new and simple automatic evaluation method for NLG called Near-Negative Distinction (NND) that repurposes prior human annotations into NND tests. In an NND test, an NLG model must place a higher likelihood on a high-quality output candidate than on a near-negative candidate with a known error. Model performance is established by the number of NND tests a model passes, as well as the distribution over task-specific errors the model fails on. Through experiments on three NLG tasks (question generation, question answering, and summarization), we show that NND achieves a higher correlation with human judgments than standard NLG evaluation metrics. We then illustrate NND evaluation in four practical scenarios, for example performing fine-grain model analysis, or studying model training dynamics. Our findings suggest that NND can give a second life to human annotations and provide low-cost NLG evaluation.

我们介绍了关于多语言信息访问（MIA）2022共享任务的研讨会的结果，评估了16种类型上多样性的语言中的跨语性开放回程答案（QA）系统。在此任务中，我们在14种类型上多样化的语言中调整了两个大规模的跨语性开放式质疑QA数据集，并使用了2种代表性不足的语言中的新注释的开放式QA数据：Tagalog和Tamil。四个团队提交了他们的系统。利用迭代开采的最佳系统是不同的负面示例和较大的预审慎模型达到32.2 F1，表现优于我们的基线4.5分。第二最佳系统使用实体感知的上下文化表示文档检索，并在泰米尔语（20.8 F1）方面取得了重大改进，而其他大多数系统的得分几乎为零。