How Well Do You Know Your Audience? Reader-aware Question Generation

When writing, a person may need to anticipate questions from their readers, but different types of readers may ask very different types of questions. If someone is writing for advice about a problem, what question will a domain expert ask, and is this different from how a novice might react? In this paper, we address the task of reader-aware question generation. We collect a new data set of questions and posts from social media, augmented with background information about the post readers. Based on predictive analysis and descriptive differences, we find that different readers, such as experts and novices, consistently ask different types of questions. We next develop several text generation models that incorporate different types of reader background, including discrete and continuous reader representations based on the readers' prior behavior. We demonstrate that reader-aware models can perform on par or slightly better than the text-only model in some cases, particularly in cases where a post attracts very different questions from readers of different groups. Our work has the potential to help writers anticipate the information needs of different readers.