A computer-aided environment for generating multiple-choice test items

Abstract

Metadata onlyThis paper describes a novel computer-aided procedure for generating multiple-choice test items from electronic documents. In addition to employing various Natural Language Processing techniques, including shallow parsing, automatic term extraction, sentence transformation and computing of semantic distance, the system makes use of language resources such as corpora and ontologies. It identifies important concepts in the text and generates questions about these concepts as well as multiple-choice distractors, offering the user the option to post-edit the test items by means of a user-friendly interface. In assisting test developers to produce items in a fast and expedient manner without compromising quality, the tool saves both time and production costs

Factual open cloze question generation for assessment of learner’s knowledge

“…They applied several NLP techniques like term extraction, shallow parsing, computation of semantic distance and sentence transformation for the task. They also used natural language corpora and ontology such as WordNet (Miller, 1995;Mitkov et al, 2006). Aldabe and Maritxalar and Aldabe et al developed systems to generate MCQ in Basque language (Aldabe, de Lacalle, Maritxalar, Martinez, Uria, 2006;Aldabe & Maritxalar, 2010).…”

“…The wrong alternatives are called distractors since they distract an examinee from choosing the correct answer. CQs and Wh-Questions with alternatives are also called Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) or Multiple Choice Test Items (MCTIs) (Agarwal, 2012;Bhatia, Kirti, & Saha, 2013;Goto et al, 2009Goto et al, , 2010Mitkov, Ha, & Karamanis, 2006;Nikolova, 2009Nikolova, , 2010. The OCQs are also similar to CQs without alternatives, which make them more difficult to solve.…”

Improve the Output from a MCQ Test Item Generator Using Statistical NLP

“…However, some problems have been encountered when applying natural language processing techniques to these documents in the past, and so an adapted form [3] of a popular theory about discourse structure [11] is applied to the source documents as a final stage in the preprocessing before the MCQ test item generator software [4]. [5] is applied.…”

“…I am therefore investigating various ways to automatically generate MCQ test items, the most promising one being the application of a MCQ test item generator [4]. [5]. The creators of this system were the only researchers in the field who expressed an interest in collaborating in order to make their system more usable for our domain.…”

T2D: Generating Dialogues Between Virtual Agents Automatically from Text

“…Typically, these are, however, single moves by a single interlocutor, rather than an entire conversation between two or more interlocutors. Some researchers have concentrated on generating questions together with possible answers (i.e., multiplechoice test items), but this work is restricted to a very specific type of questionanswer pairs (see, e.g., [11]). …”