Non-Essential Is NEcessary: Order-agnostic Multi-hop Question Generation

Abstract

Existing multi-hop question generation (QG) methods treat answer-irrelevant documents as non-essential and remove them as impurities. However, this approach can create a training-inference discrepancy when impurities cannot be completely removed, which can lead to a decrease in model performance. To overcome this problem, we propose an auxiliary task, called order-agnostic, which leverages non-essential data in the training phase to create a robust model and extract the consistent embeddings in real-world inference environments. Additionally, we use a single LM to perform both ranker and generator through a prompt-based approach without applying additional external modules. Furthermore, we discover that appropriate utilization of the non-essential components can achieve a significant performance increase. Finally, experiments conducted on HotpotQA dataset achieve state-of-the-art.