Computation and Language - Benchmarking Critical Questions Generation A Challenging Reasoning Task for Large Language Models

Hey PaperLedge crew, Ernis here! Get ready to flex your critical thinking muscles because today we're diving into a fascinating area of AI research: Critical Questions Generation, or CQs-Gen for short.

So, what exactly is CQs-Gen? Imagine you're listening to a friend make an argument. A good critical thinker doesn't just accept it at face value, right? They ask questions: "Are you sure that's true? What assumptions are you making? Is there another way to look at this?" CQs-Gen is about teaching computers to do the same thing - to automatically generate those insightful questions that challenge the reasoning behind an argument.

Think of it like this: your friend says, "It's raining, so the game will be canceled." A critical question might be, "Does the game always get canceled when it rains? What if it's an indoor stadium?" See how that question exposes an underlying assumption?

Now, you might be thinking, "Why is this important?" Well, the researchers behind this paper believe that CQs-Gen can be a game-changer for a couple of reasons:

• Sharper AI: By forcing AI to question assumptions, we can create systems that are better at reasoning and problem-solving. Imagine AI that can not only process information but also identify its weaknesses and biases.
• Better Critical Thinkers (Us!): CQs-Gen systems can act as a "critical thinking coach," helping us to identify flaws in our own reasoning and explore alternative perspectives. It's like having a sparring partner for your brain!

But here's the challenge: training AI to ask good critical questions is tough! And that's where this paper comes in. The researchers realized that progress in CQs-Gen was being held back by two key problems:

• Lack of Data: There just wasn't enough data available to train AI models effectively. Imagine trying to teach a dog a new trick without any treats or commands!
• No Standard Way to Judge: How do you know if a question generated by AI is actually good? There wasn't a consistent way to evaluate the quality of these questions.

So, what did they do? They rolled up their sleeves and tackled both problems head-on!

First, they created a huge, brand-new dataset of manually-annotated critical questions. That means real people wrote and labeled questions designed to challenge specific arguments. This is like creating a comprehensive textbook of critical thinking prompts for AI to learn from.

Second, they explored different ways to automatically evaluate the quality of the questions generated by AI. They discovered that using large language models (LLMs, like the ones powering many chatbots) as a reference point was the most effective way to align with human judgments. Think of it as using a panel of expert critical thinkers to grade the AI's homework.

To really put things to the test, they evaluated 11 different LLMs using their new dataset and evaluation method. The results showed that even the best LLMs still have a long way to go in mastering critical question generation, which highlights just how complex this task really is!

The best part? The researchers are making their data, code, and a public leaderboard available to everyone! Their goal is to encourage more research into CQs-Gen, not just to improve model performance, but also to explore the real-world benefits of this technology for both AI and human critical thinking.

Quote from the paper:

"Data, code, and a public leaderboard are provided to encourage further research not only in terms of model performance, but also to explore the practical benefits of CQs-Gen for both automated reasoning and human critical thinking."

So, here are a couple of thought-provoking questions that come to my mind:

• How could CQs-Gen be used to combat misinformation and fake news? Could it help us to identify biases in news articles or social media posts?
• What are the ethical considerations of using AI to generate critical questions? Could it be used to manipulate or silence dissenting opinions?

That's all for this episode! Hopefully, this research has sparked your curiosity about the exciting potential of Critical Questions Generation. Until next time, keep those critical thinking caps on!

Credit to Paper authors: Banca Calvo Figueras, Rodrigo Agerri