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1. Generating Multiple Choice Questions with a Multi-Angle Question Answering Model

   https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7761561  

   Olney, Andrew M. ( January 2023 , Zenodo)

   Fancsali, Stephen E. ; Rus, Vasile (Ed.)

   Multi-angle question answering models have recently been proposed that promise to perform related tasks like question generation. However, performance on related tasks has not been thoroughly studied. We investigate a leading model called Macaw on the task of multiple choice question generation and evaluate its performance on three angles that systematically reduce the complexity of the task. Our results indicate that despite the promise of generalization, Macaw performs poorly on untrained angles. Even on a trained angle, Macaw fails to generate four distinct multiple-choice options on 17% of inputs. We propose augmenting multiple- choice options by paraphrasing angle input and show this increases overall success to 97.5%. A human evaluation comparing the augmented multiple-choice questions with textbook questions on the same topic reveals that Macaw questions broadly score highly but below human questions.

    

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2. Generating multiple choice questions from a textbook: LLMs match human performance on most metrics

   Olney, Andrew M ( September 2023 , CEUR workshop proceedings)

   Moore, S ; Stamper, J ; Cao, T ; Liu, Z ; Hu, X ; Lu, Y ; Liang, J ; Khosravi, H ; Denny, P ; Singh, A (Ed.)

   Multiple choice questions are traditionally expensive to produce. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to fine-tuned LLMs that generate questions competitive with human-authored questions. However, the relative capabilities of ChatGPT-family models have not yet been established for this task. We present a carefully-controlled human evaluation of three conditions: a fine-tuned, augmented version of Macaw, instruction-tuned Bing Chat with zero-shot prompting, and humanauthored questions from a college science textbook. Our results indicate that on six of seven measures tested, both LLM’s performance was not significantly different from human performance. Analysis of LLM errors further suggests that Macaw and Bing Chat have different failure modes for this task: Macaw tends to repeat answer options whereas Bing Chat tends to not include the specified answer in the answer options. For Macaw, removing error items from analysis results in performance on par with humans for all metrics; for Bing Chat, removing error items improves performance but does not reach human-level performance. 

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3. Generating multiple choice questions from a textbook: LLMs match human performance on most metrics

   Olney, A. ( June 2023 , Workshop on Empowering Education with LLMs - the Next-Gen Interface and Content Generation at the AIED’23 Conference)

   Multiple choice questions are traditionally expensive to produce. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have led to fine-tuned LLMs that generate questions competitive with human-authored questions. However, the relative capabilities of ChatGPT-family models have not yet been established for this task. We present a carefully-controlled human evaluation of three conditions: a fine-tuned, augmented version of Macaw, instruction-tuned Bing Chat with zero-shot prompting, and humanauthored questions from a college science textbook. Our results indicate that on six of seven measures tested, both LLM’s performance was not significantly different from human performance. Analysis of LLM errors further suggests that Macaw and Bing Chat have different failure modes for this task: Macaw tends to repeat answer options whereas Bing Chat tends to not include the specified answer in the answer options. For Macaw, removing error items from analysis results in performance on par with humans for all metrics; for Bing Chat, removing error items improves performance but does not reach human-level performance. 

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4. Hurdles to Progress in Long-form Question Answering

   https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.393  

   Krishna, Kalpesh ; Roy, Aurko ; Iyyer, Mohit ( June 2021 , Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies)

   null (Ed.)

   The task of long-form question answering (LFQA) involves retrieving documents relevant to a given question and using them to generate a paragraph-length answer. While many models have recently been proposed for LFQA, we show in this paper that the task formulation raises fundamental challenges regarding evaluation and dataset creation that currently preclude meaningful modeling progress. To demonstrate these challenges, we first design a new system that relies on sparse attention and contrastive retriever learning to achieve state-of-the-art performance on the ELI5 LFQA dataset. While our system tops the public leaderboard, a detailed analysis reveals several troubling trends: (1) our system’s generated answers are not actually grounded in the documents that it retrieves; (2) ELI5 contains significant train / validation overlap, as at least 81% of ELI5 validation questions occur in paraphrased form in the training set; (3) ROUGE-L is not an informative metric of generated answer quality and can be easily gamed; and (4) human evaluations used for other text generation tasks are unreliable for LFQA. We offer suggestions to mitigate each of these issues, which we hope will lead to more rigorous LFQA research and meaningful progress in the future. 

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5. Leveraging Large Language Models for Multiple Choice Question Answering

   Joshua Robinson ; David Wingate ( January 2023 , International Conference on Learning Representations)

   While large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3 have achieved impressive results on multiple choice question answering (MCQA) tasks in the zero, one, and few-shot settings, they generally lag behind the MCQA state of the art (SOTA). MCQA tasks have traditionally been presented to LLMs like cloze tasks. An LLM is conditioned on a question (without the associated answer options) and its chosen option is the one assigned the highest probability after normalization (for length, etc.). A more natural prompting approach is to present the question and answer options to the LLM jointly and have it output the symbol (e.g., “A”) associated with its chosen answer option. This approach allows the model to explicitly compare answer options, reduces computational costs, and mitigates the effects of tokenization scheme and answer option representations on answer selection. For the natural approach to be effective, the LLM it is used with must be able to associate answer options with the symbols that represent them. The LLM needs what we term multiple choice symbol binding (MCSB) ability. This ability varies greatly by model. We show that a model with high MCSB ability performs much better with the natural approach than with the traditional approach across 20 diverse datasets and largely closes the gap with the SOTA, suggesting that the MCQA ability of LLMs has been previously underestimated. 

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