Question Generation for French: Collating Parsers and Paraphrasing Questions

This article describes a question generation system for French. The transformation of declarative sentences into questions relies on two different syntactic parsers and named entity recognition tools. This makes it possible to further diversify the questions generated and to possibly alleviate the problems inherent to the analysis tools. The system also generates reformulations for the questions based on variations in the question words, inducing answers with different granularities, and nominalisations of action verbs. We evaluate the questions generated for sentences extracted from two different corpora: a corpus of newspaper articles used for the CLEF Question Answering evaluation campaign and a corpus of simplified online encyclopedia articles. The evaluation shows that the system is able to generate a majority of good and medium quality questions. We also present an original evaluation of the question generation system using the question analysis module of a question answering system

Evaluating an NLG System using Post-Editing

Computer-generated texts, whether from Natural Language Generation (NLG) or Machine Translation (MT) systems, are often post-edited by humans before being released to users. The frequency and type of post-edits is a measure of how well the system works, and can be used for evaluation. We describe how we have used post-edit data to evaluate SUMTIME-MOUSAM, an NLG system that produces weather forecasts