Synthetic Multimodal Question Generation

Ian Wu, Sravan Jayanthi, Vijay Viswanathan, Simon Rosenberg, Sina Khoshfetrat Pakazad, Tongshuang Wu, Graham Neubig


Abstract
Multimodal Retrieval Augmented Generation (MMRAG) is a powerful approach to question-answering over multimodal documents. A key challenge with evaluating MMRAG is the paucity of high-quality datasets matching the question styles and modalities of interest. In light of this, we propose SMMQG, a synthetic data generation framework. SMMQG leverages interplay between a retriever, large language model (LLM) and large multimodal model (LMM) to generate question and answer pairs directly from multimodal documents, with the questions conforming to specified styles and modalities. We use SMMQG to generate an MMRAG dataset of 1024 questions over Wikipedia documents and evaluate state-of-the-art models using it, revealing insights into model performance that are attainable only through style- and modality-specific evaluation data. Next, we measure the quality of data produced by SMMQG via a human study. We find that the quality of SMMQG-generated synthetic data is on par with the quality of the crowdsourced benchmark MMQA and that downstream evaluation results using both datasets strongly concur.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.759
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12960–12993
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.759/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.759
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ian Wu, Sravan Jayanthi, Vijay Viswanathan, Simon Rosenberg, Sina Khoshfetrat Pakazad, Tongshuang Wu, and Graham Neubig. 2024. Synthetic Multimodal Question Generation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 12960–12993, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Synthetic Multimodal Question Generation (Wu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.759.pdf