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Main Authors: Wu, Yating, Mangla, Ritika, Dimakis, Alexandros G., Durrett, Greg, Li, Junyi Jessy
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10917
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author Wu, Yating
Mangla, Ritika
Dimakis, Alexandros G.
Durrett, Greg
Li, Junyi Jessy
author_facet Wu, Yating
Mangla, Ritika
Dimakis, Alexandros G.
Durrett, Greg
Li, Junyi Jessy
contents Inquisitive questions -- open-ended, curiosity-driven questions people ask as they read -- are an integral part of discourse processing (Kehler and Rohde, 2017; Onea, 2016) and comprehension (Prince, 2004). Recent work in NLP has taken advantage of question generation capabilities of LLMs to enhance a wide range of applications. But the space of inquisitive questions is vast: many questions can be evoked from a given context. So which of those should be prioritized to find answers? Linguistic theories, unfortunately, have not yet provided an answer to this question. This paper presents QSALIENCE, a salience predictor of inquisitive questions. QSALIENCE is instruction-tuned over our dataset of linguist-annotated salience scores of 1,766 (context, question) pairs. A question scores high on salience if answering it would greatly enhance the understanding of the text (Van Rooy, 2003). We show that highly salient questions are empirically more likely to be answered in the same article, bridging potential questions (Onea, 2016) with Questions Under Discussion (Roberts, 2012). We further validate our findings by showing that answering salient questions is an indicator of summarization quality in news.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_10917
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Which questions should I answer? Salience Prediction of Inquisitive Questions
Wu, Yating
Mangla, Ritika
Dimakis, Alexandros G.
Durrett, Greg
Li, Junyi Jessy
Computation and Language
Inquisitive questions -- open-ended, curiosity-driven questions people ask as they read -- are an integral part of discourse processing (Kehler and Rohde, 2017; Onea, 2016) and comprehension (Prince, 2004). Recent work in NLP has taken advantage of question generation capabilities of LLMs to enhance a wide range of applications. But the space of inquisitive questions is vast: many questions can be evoked from a given context. So which of those should be prioritized to find answers? Linguistic theories, unfortunately, have not yet provided an answer to this question. This paper presents QSALIENCE, a salience predictor of inquisitive questions. QSALIENCE is instruction-tuned over our dataset of linguist-annotated salience scores of 1,766 (context, question) pairs. A question scores high on salience if answering it would greatly enhance the understanding of the text (Van Rooy, 2003). We show that highly salient questions are empirically more likely to be answered in the same article, bridging potential questions (Onea, 2016) with Questions Under Discussion (Roberts, 2012). We further validate our findings by showing that answering salient questions is an indicator of summarization quality in news.
title Which questions should I answer? Salience Prediction of Inquisitive Questions
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10917