Controllable Decontextualization of Yes/No Question and Answers into
  Factual Statements
Lingbo Mo Besnik Fetahu Oleg Rokhlenko Shervin Malmasi
Yes/No or polar questions represent one of the main linguistic question
categories. They consist of a main interrogative clause, for which the answer
is binary (assertion or negation). Polar questions and answers (PQA) represent
a valuable knowledge resource present in many community and other curated QA
sources, such as forums or e-commerce applications. Using answers to polar
questions alone in other contexts is not trivial. Answers are contextualized,
and presume that the interrogative question clause and any shared knowledge
between the asker and answerer are provided.
  We address the problem of controllable rewriting of answers to polar
questions into decontextualized and succinct factual statements. We propose a
Transformer sequence to sequence model that utilizes soft-constraints to ensure
controllable rewriting, such that the output statement is semantically
equivalent to its PQA input. Evaluation on three separate PQA datasets as
measured through automated and human evaluation metrics show that our proposed
approach achieves the best performance when compared to existing baselines.