  We study the new problem of automatic question generation (QG) from
multi-modal sources containing images and texts, significantly expanding the
scope of most of the existing work that focuses exclusively on QG from only
textual sources. We propose a simple solution for our new problem, called
MultiQG-TI, which enables a text-only question generator to process visual
input in addition to textual input. Specifically, we leverage an image-to-text
model and an optical character recognition model to obtain the textual
description of the image and extract any texts in the image, respectively, and
then feed them together with the input texts to the question generator. We only
fine-tune the question generator while keeping the other components fixed. On
the challenging ScienceQA dataset, we demonstrate that MultiQG-TI significantly
outperforms ChatGPT with few-shot prompting, despite having hundred-times less
trainable parameters. Additional analyses empirically confirm the necessity of
both visual and textual signals for QG and show the impact of various modeling
choices.
