Review on Neural Question Generation for Education Purposes

Abstract Questioning plays a vital role in education, directing knowledge construction and assessing students’ understanding. However, creating high-level questions requires significant creativity and effort. Automatic question generation is expected to facilitate the generation of not only fluent and relevant but also educationally valuable questions. While rule-based methods are intuitive for short inputs, they struggle with longer and more complex inputs. Neural question generation (NQG) has shown better results in this regard. This review summarizes the advancements in NQG between 2016 and early 2022. The focus is on the development of NQG for educational purposes, including challenges and research opportunities. We found that although NQG can generate fluent and relevant factoid-type questions, few studies focus on education. Specifically, there is limited literature using context in the form of multi-paragraphs, which due to the input limitation of the current deep learning techniques, require key content identification. The desirable key content should be important to specific topics or learning objectives and be able to generate certain types of questions. A further research opportunity is controllable NQG systems, which can be customized by taking into account factors like difficulty level, desired answer type, and other individualized needs. Equally important, the results of our review also suggest that it is necessary to create datasets specific to the question generation tasks with annotations that support better learning for neural-based methods.