  An engaging and provocative question can open up a great conversation. In
this work, we explore a novel scenario: a conversation agent views a set of the
user's photos (for example, from social media platforms) and asks an engaging
question to initiate a conversation with the user. The existing
vision-to-question models mostly generate tedious and obvious questions, which
might not be ideals conversation starters. This paper introduces a two-phase
framework that first generates a visual story for the photo set and then uses
the story to produce an interesting question. The human evaluation shows that
our framework generates more response-provoking questions for starting
conversations than other vision-to-question baselines.
