pankajmehar / question-generation-1

Given a sentence automatically generate reading comprehension style factual questions from that sentence, such that the sentence contains answers to those questions.

Question Generation from Declarative Sentences

Update: If you have a feature request please open an issue and I might implement it, or feel free to submit a pull request.

Given a statement of text such as,

Handheld devices find ways to bolster U.S. homeland defense and response.

The questions generated will be:

What do handheld devices find?

The original code is a product of the PhD thesis of Michael Heilman. The original code is written in Java and other resources can be found here.

For all Pythonistas out there this repository provides a Python wrapper to simplify the execution of the code above. The hardest part of the whole project is setup. Yes you heard it right.

Setup

To run this code you need to have a Java Runtime Environment installed. Java downloads can be found on the Oracle website here. Version 1.6.0_07 of Java was used in developing the original system. The code is packaged up for use on UNIX systems, or for use in the Eclipse IDE.

Dependencies

The following are the dependencies of the original code.

-Apache Commons Lang (http://commons.apache.org/lang/)

-Apahce Commons Logging (http://commons.apache.org/logging/)

-JUnit (http://www.junit.org/)

-JWNL (http://sourceforge.net/projects/jwordnet/)

-Stanford NLP tools (http://www-nlp.stanford.edu/software/)

-WordNet (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/)

-The sst-light-0.4 release of the SuperSenseTagger, from which we used the SemCor data for training the supersense tagger (http://sourceforge.net/projects/supersensetag/)

-The Semcor corpus, used for training the supersense tagger (http://www.cse.unt.edu/~rada/downloads.html#semcor)

-The WEKA toolkit, version 3.6.0 (http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/)

The good news is that you don't need to download each one of those individually because everything is neatly packed in the QuestionGeneration.zip bundled with the code.

1. First, clone this repository,

   git clone https://github.com/sumehta/question-generation.git

2. Unzip the QuestionGeneration.zip file

   unzip QuestionGeneration.zip

   cd QuestionGeneration

3. [Optinal] Start two servers to speed up the script, Stanford Parser server and the SST servers in two separate terminals.

   bash runStanfordParserServer.sh

   bash runSSTServer.sh

4. Finally, to get a list of questions for a statement, execute this command

   python question.py -s 'Handheld devices find ways to bolster U.S. homeland defense and response'

For other options exposed by the script type,

python question.py -help

For developers, I have also included a QuestionGenerator class, that exposes other methods for processing large collections.

Note: This repository is still in dev and I'll be exposing more options exposed by the original system.