# A Unified Query-based Generative Model for Question Generation and Question Answering

Source: [A Unified Query-based Generative Model for Question Generation and Question Answering](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa64bc1e209131cea06291>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T21:09:58.940Z

Authors: Linfeng Song, Zhiguo Wang, Wael Hamza

Published: 2017-09-04T17:54:49.000Z

## Abstract

We propose a query-based generative model for solving both tasks of question generation (QG) and question an- swering (QA). The model follows the classic encoder- decoder framework. The encoder takes a passage and a query as input then performs query understanding by matching the query with the passage from multiple per- spectives. The decoder is an attention-based Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) model with copy and coverage mechanisms. In the QG task, a question is generated from the system given the passage and the target answer, whereas in the QA task, the answer is generated given the question and the passage. During the training stage, we leverage a policy-gradient reinforcement learning algorithm to overcome exposure bias, a major prob- lem resulted from sequence learning with cross-entropy loss. For the QG task, our experiments show higher per- formances than the state-of-the-art results. When used as additional training data, the automatically generated questions even improve the performance of a strong ex- tractive QA system. In addition, our model shows bet- ter performance than the state-of-the-art baselines of the generative QA task.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.01058>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.01058.pdf>)
