Automatically Generating Questions from Queries for Community-based Question Answering

摘要

This paper proposes a method that automatically generates questions from queries for community-based question answering(cQA) services. Our query-to-question generation model is built upon templates induced from search engine query logs. In detail, we first extract pairs of queries and user-clicked questions from query logs, with which we induce question generation templates. Then, when a new query is submitted, we select proper templates for the query and generate questions through template instantiation. We evaluated the method with a set of short queries randomly selected from query logs, and the generated questions were judged by human annotators. Experimental results show that, the precision of 1-best and 5-best generated questions is 67% and 61%, respectively, which outperforms a baseline method that directly retrieves questions for queries in a cQA site search engine. In addition, the results also suggest that the proposed method can improve the search of cQA archives.