Converting an English Statement into a Questi0n

Question

(Apologies for the title. Stack overflow doesn't allow the word "Question" in titles.)

How would one go about writing an algorithm to convert an english statement into a question? Where would one even begin? For example:

"The ingredients for an omelette are eggs, bacon, cheese, and onions" would become "What are the ingredients for an omelette?" or "The ingredients for an omelette are what?"

I can imagine parsing a sentence into it's components, and then re-arranging these while adding and removing words to form a grammatically correct sentence, but I'd have no idea where to start. I know this is by no means a trivial task, and I think the most helpful thing right now would be pointers to literature or similar problems.

Answer 1

Check out the ACL Anthology for the papers published on Question Generation using template-based approaches.

Below are a few to start:

Popowich, David Lindberg Fred, and John Nesbit Phil Winne. "Generating Natural Language Questions to Support Learning On-Line." https://aclweb.org/anthology/W/W13/W13-2114.pdf

Rokhlenko, Oleg, and Idan Szpektor. "Generating Synthetic Comparable Questions for News Articles." http://aclweb.org/anthology/P/P13/P13-1073.pdf

Zhao, Shiqi, et al. "Automatically Generating Questions from Queries for Community-based Question Answering." IJCNLP. 2011. https://aclweb.org/anthology/I/I11/I11-1104.pdf