Follow-Up question generation using neural tensor network-based domain ontology population in an interview coaching system

This study proposes an approach to follow-up question generation based on a populated domain ontology in a conversational interview coaching system. The purpose of this study is to generate the follow-up questions which are more related to the meaning beyond the literal content in the user's answer based on the background knowledge in a populated domain ontology. Firstly, a convolutional neural tensor network (CNTN) was applied for selecting a key sentence from the user answer. Secondly, the neural tensor network (NTN) was used to model the relationship between the subjects and objects in the resource description framework (RDF) triple, defined as (subject, predicate, object), in each predicate from the ConceptNet for domain ontology population. The words in the key sentence were then used to retrieve relevant triples from the domain ontology for filling into the slots in the question templates to generate potential follow-up questions. Finally, the CNTN-based sentence matching model was employed to choose the one most related to the answer sentence as the final follow-up question. This study used 5-fold cross-validation for performance evaluation. The experimental results showed the generation performance in the proposed model was higher than the traditional method. The performance of key sentence selection model achieved 81.94%, and the sentence matching model achieved 92.28%.