  Asking questions about a situation is an inherent step towards understanding
it. To this end, we introduce the task of role question generation, which,
given a predicate mention and a passage, requires producing a set of questions
asking about all possible semantic roles of the predicate. We develop a
two-stage model for this task, which first produces a context-independent
question prototype for each role and then revises it to be contextually
appropriate for the passage. Unlike most existing approaches to question
generation, our approach does not require conditioning on existing answers in
the text. Instead, we condition on the type of information to inquire about,
regardless of whether the answer appears explicitly in the text, could be
inferred from it, or should be sought elsewhere. Our evaluation demonstrates
that we generate diverse and well-formed questions for a large, broad-coverage
ontology of predicates and roles.
