Deep Questions without Deep Understanding

We develop an approach for generating deep (i.e, high-level) comprehension questions from novel text that bypasses the myriad challenges of creating a full semantic representation. We do this by decomposing the task into an ontology-crowd-relevance workflow, consisting of first representing the original text in a low-dimensional ontology, then crowd-sourcing candidate question templates aligned with that space, and finally ranking potentially relevant templates for a novel region of text. If ontological labels are not available, we infer them from the text. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method on a corpus of articles from Wikipedia alongside human judgments, and find that we can generate relevant deep questions with a precision of over 85% while maintaining a recall of 70%.