Generating Coherent Narratives with Subtopic Planning to Answer How-to Questions
Pengshan Cai, Mo Yu, Fei Liu, Hong Yu · 2022
Answering how-to questions remains a major challenge in question answering research.A vast number of narrow, long-tail questions cannot be readily answered using a search engine.Moreover, there is little to no annotated data available to help develop such systems.This paper makes a first attempt at generating coherent, long-form answers for how-to questions.We propose new architectures, consisting of passage retrieval, subtopic planning and narrative generation, to consolidate multiple relevant passages into a coherent, explanatory answer.Our subtopic planning module aims to produce a set of relevant, diverse subtopics that serve as the backbone for answer generation to improve topic coherence.We present extensive experiments on a WikiHow dataset repurposed for long-form question answering.Empirical results demonstrate that generating narratives to answer how-to questions is a challenging task.Nevertheless, our architecture incorporated with subtopic planning can produce highquality, diverse narratives evaluated using automatic metrics and human assessment. 1 1 We have made our dataset and source code available at https://github.com/pengshancai/how-to-QAHow to Stop the Spread of Covid-19 Method 1 Method 2 Practicing Healthy Habits Stay at home if you can.Although it's a simple solution, avoiding contact with other people is an effective way to prevent the spread of COVID-19… Wear a mask or face covering before going out in public.Slip on a medical mask or face covering before you go grocery shopping, or enter any public area… How to Naturally Reduce Blood Pressure? 1. Changing your diet Eat a balanced diet.Drink lots of water.Cut back on salt intake.Avoid alcohol and smoking... 2. Exercise regularly Keep the habit of working out.Lose weight if you are overweight... 1. Changing your diet.2. Getting medical help…