How to Engage your Readers? Generating Guiding Questions to Promote Active Reading (2024)

Abstract: Using questions in written text is an effective strategy to enhance readability. However, what makes an active reading question good, what the linguistic role of these questions is, and what is their impact on human reading remains understudied. We introduce GuidingQ, a dataset of 10K in-text questions from textbooks and scientific articles. By analyzing the dataset, we present a comprehensive understanding of the use, distribution, and linguistic characteristics of these questions. Then, we explore various approaches to generate such questions using language models. Our results highlight the importance of capturing inter-question relationships and the challenge of question position identification in generating these questions. Finally, we conduct a human study to understand the implication of such questions on reading comprehension. We find that the generated questions are of high quality and are almost as effective as human-written questions in terms of improving readers’ memorization and comprehension.

## introduction questions play an important role in reading comprehension. through actively raising questions and seeking answers from the content during reading, readers can deeply engage with the text and achieve better comprehension @xcite . however, asking good questions is challenging and requires complex skills. how can we facilitate readers' active thinking and questioning during reading? ## related work here we focus on discussing the linguistic role of questions. questions can be used as a tool for discourse planning. the question under discussion (qud) framework uses questions to interpret the discourse relationship between textual units within a document @xcite @xcite . for example, the relationship between "s a : a night of largely peaceful protests ended early monday in a bloody" and "s b : hours earlier, egypt's new interim leadership had narrowed in on a compromise candidate to serve as the next prime minister." can be described by question "what happened before the clash?", where s a , which elicits the question, is called anchor sentence and s b is the answer sentence. studying qud with modern nlp techniques is a relatively new field where most efforts focus on data construction @xcite @xcite . while qud provides a more flexible way to represent discourse connections compared to predefined fixed relationships (e.g., elaboration, condition) than other frameworks like rhetorical structured theory (rst; @xcite ), how to use these implicit questions to assist readers is not straightforward. in this paper, we instead focus on questions that are explicitly presented in a text by the author, which we call guiding questions. we argue such questions are more powerful. besides their discourse effect, these questions directly interact with readers. therefore, they have the potential to influence readers' behaviors @xcite . for example, articles titled with questions are found to obtain more downloads @xcite . in terms of the goal, qud strives to explore the dense space of questions to interpret exhaustive intra-document relationships, while we aim to distill sparse but crucial questions to engage readers without overwhelming them. we highlight the question position identification task as a preliminary step before generating questions. this dimension is neglected by previous qud or generic question generation (qg) studies. however, when questions are used as a communicative tool to interact with readers during reading, when and where to raise them is arguably important. we hope this study sheds light on a greater understanding of the implication of questions in reading comprehension. ## taxonomy of guiding questions this section describes our taxonomy of guiding questions. the taxonomy is built upon the discussion in @xcite , which we adapt based on our dataset (section 4). in particular, we classify questions into five different roles based on their different discourse or interactional effects. their definitions and examples are provided below. questions in titles: how do philosophers arrive at truth? is there no quantum form of einstein gravity? why do house-hunting ants recruit in both directions? guidingq • documents • ques+ons • answers • evidence • ques+on roles textbook chapters research articles s5: role iden,fica,on s4: evidence extrac0on s6: quality review q1: are the values central to business ethics universal? one of the perennial themes is business ethics … q2: is there a set of universal values that all can endorse? q3: are there "human values" that apply everywhere …? corrup5on appears to exist everywhere, so it would … q4: can business ethics provide one? complete q1: … a4: business ethics can provide a solu3on to corrup3on by … complete q4: can business ethics provide one solu3on to corrup3on? answer to q4: business ethics can provide a solu3on to corrup3on by … evidence of q4: 1. business ethics mo3vates managers to 1) meet legal… answer to q1: … source texts ❌ ✔ role 4: establish claim q4: can business ethics provide one solu3on to corrup3on? q1: arouse interst q2: frame purpose q3: frame purpose q4: establish calim answer to q2: … 2.corrup3on can be defeated only by individuals ac3ng in accordance with … s1: ques0on extrac0on s2: ques0on comple0on s3: ques0on answering ## guidingq dataset in this section, we first discuss the choice and rationale of source texts ( § 4.1), followed by the construction pipeline (figure 2 ) of the guidingq dataset ( § 4.2). then, we present a series of distributional features of guiding questions ( § 4.3). ## guiding question generation in this section, we first describe our methods to model guiding questions and then report experimental results. ## human study finally, we conduct a between-group human study to investigate the impact of guiding questions on reading comprehension. participants are asked to read articles with (or without) questions, after which we gather their feedback and analyze their information retention and understanding to gain a holistic view of the effect of guiding questions. ## conclusion this paper studies the discourse and interactional role of guiding questions in textbooks and scientific articles. we explore various approaches for modeling these questions, providing insights into how to model this task and highlighting challenges to be solved. we validate our results with human studies, which demonstrate reading with guiding questions can improve the high-level memorization and understanding of human readers.