Navigating the Landscape of Hint Generation Research: From the Past to the Future

Digital education has gained popularity in the last decade, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. With the improving capabilities of large language models to reason and communicate with users, envisioning intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) that can facilitate self-learning is not very far-fetched. One integral component to fulfill this vision is the ability to give accurate and effective feedback via hints to scaffold the learning process. In this survey article, we present a comprehensive review of prior research on hint generation, aiming to bridge the gap between research in education and cognitive science, and research in AI and Natural Language Processing. Informed by our findings, we propose a formal definition of the hint generation task, and discuss the roadmap of building an effective hint generation system aligned with the formal definition, including open challenges, future directions and ethical considerations.

TriviaHG: A Dataset for Automatic Hint Generation from Factoid Questions

Nowadays, individuals tend to engage in dialogues with Large Language Models, seeking answers to their questions. In times when such answers are readily accessible to anyone, the stimulation and preservation of human's cognitive abilities, as well as the assurance of maintaining good reasoning skills by humans becomes crucial. This study addresses such needs by proposing hints (instead of final answers or before giving answers) as a viable solution. We introduce a framework for the automatic hint generation for factoid questions, employing it to construct TriviaHG, a novel large-scale dataset featuring 160,230 hints corresponding to 16,645 questions from the TriviaQA dataset. Additionally, we present an automatic evaluation method that measures the Convergence and Familiarity quality attributes of hints. To evaluate the TriviaHG dataset and the proposed evaluation method, we enlisted 10 individuals to annotate 2,791 hints and tasked 6 humans with answering questions using the provided hints. The effectiveness of hints varied, with success rates of 96%, 78%, and 36% for questions with easy, medium, and hard answers, respectively. Moreover, the proposed automatic evaluation methods showed a robust correlation with annotators' results. Conclusively, the findings highlight three key insights: the facilitative role of hints in resolving unknown questions, the dependence of hint quality on answer difficulty, and the feasibility of employing automatic evaluation methods for hint assessment.

ChroniclingAmericaQA: A Large-scale Question Answering Dataset based on Historical American Newspaper Pages

Question answering (QA) and Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) tasks have significantly advanced in recent years due to the rapid development of deep learning techniques and, more recently, large language models. At the same time, many benchmark datasets have become available for QA and MRC tasks. However, most existing large-scale benchmark datasets have been created predominantly using synchronous document collections like Wikipedia or the Web. Archival document collections, such as historical newspapers, contain valuable information from the past that is still not widely used to train large language models. To further contribute to advancing QA and MRC tasks and to overcome the limitation of previous datasets, we introduce ChroniclingAmericaQA, a large-scale dataset with 485K question-answer pairs created based on the historical newspaper collection Chronicling America. Our dataset is constructed from a subset of the Chronicling America newspaper collection spanning 120 years. One of the significant challenges for utilizing digitized historical newspaper collections is the low quality of OCR text. Therefore, to enable realistic testing of QA models, our dataset can be used in three different ways: answering questions from raw and noisy content, answering questions from cleaner, corrected version of the content, as well as answering questions from scanned images of newspaper pages. This and the fact that ChroniclingAmericaQA spans the longest time period among available QA datasets make it quite a unique and useful resource.

BAS: An Answer Selection Method Using BERT Language Model

In recent years, Question Answering systems have become more popular and widely used by users. Despite the increasing popularity of these systems, the their performance is not even sufficient for textual data and requires further research. These systems consist of several parts that one of them is the Answer Selection component. This component detects the most relevant answer from a list of candidate answers. The methods presented in previous researches have attempted to provide an independent model to undertake the answer-selection task. An independent model cannot comprehend the syntactic and semantic features of questions and answers with a small training dataset. To fill this gap, language models can be employed in implementing the answer selection part. This action enables the model to have a better understanding of the language in order to understand questions and answers better than previous works. In this research, we will present the "BAS" (BERT Answer Selection) that uses the BERT language model to comprehend language. The empirical results of applying the model on the TrecQA Raw, TrecQA Clean, and WikiQA datasets demonstrate that using a robust language model such as BERT can enhance the performance. Using a more robust classifier also enhances the effect of the language model on the answer selection component. The results demonstrate that language comprehension is an essential requirement in natural language processing tasks such as answer-selection.

Attention-based Pairwise Multi-Perspective Convolutional Neural Network for Answer Selection in Question Answering

Over the past few years, question answering and information retrieval systems have become widely used. These systems attempt to find the answer of the asked questions from raw text sources. A component of these systems is Answer Selection which selects the most relevant answer from candidate answers. Syntactic similarities were mostly used to compute the similarity, but in recent works, deep neural networks have been used which have made a significant improvement in this field. In this research, a model is proposed to select the most relevant answers to the factoid question from the candidate answers. The proposed model ranks the candidate answers in terms of semantic and syntactic similarity to the question, using convolutional neural networks. In this research, Attention mechanism and Sparse feature vector use the context-sensitive interactions between questions and answer sentence. Wide convolution increases the importance of the interrogative word. Pairwise ranking is used to learn differentiable representations to distinguish positive and negative answers. Our model indicates strong performance on the TrecQA beating previous state-of-the-art systems by 2.62% in MAP and 2.13% in MRR while using the benefits of no additional syntactic parsers and external tools. The results show that using context-sensitive interactions between question and answer sentences can help to find the correct answer more accurately.