704 research outputs found
Knowledge-Driven Distractor Generation for Cloze-style Multiple Choice Questions
In this paper, we propose a novel configurable framework to automatically
generate distractive choices for open-domain cloze-style multiple-choice
questions, which incorporates a general-purpose knowledge base to effectively
create a small distractor candidate set, and a feature-rich learning-to-rank
model to select distractors that are both plausible and reliable. Experimental
results on datasets across four domains show that our framework yields
distractors that are more plausible and reliable than previous methods. This
dataset can also be used as a benchmark for distractor generation in the
future.Comment: To appear at AAAI 202
Sensitivity to syntax in visual cortex
One of the most intriguing findings on language comprehension is that violations of syntactic predictions can affect event-related potentials as early as 120 ms, in the same time-window as early sensory processing. This effect, the so-called early left-anterior negativity (ELAN), has been argued to reflect word category access and initial syntactic structure building (Friederici, 2002). In two experiments, we used magnetoencephalography to investigate whether (a) rapid word category identification relies on overt category-marking closed-class morphemes and (b) whether violations of word category predictions affect modality-specific sensory responses. Participants read sentences containing violations of word category predictions. Unexpected items varied in whether or not their word category was marked by an overt function morpheme. In Experiment 1, the amplitude of the visual evoked M100 component was increased for unexpected items, but only when word category was overtly marked by a function morpheme. Dipole modeling localized the generator of this effect to the occipital cortex. Experiment 2 replicated the main results of Experiment 1 and eliminated two non-morphology-related explanations of the M100 contrast we observed between targets containing overt category-marking and targets that lacked such morphology. Our results show that during reading, syntactically relevant cues in the input can affect activity in occipital regions at around 125 ms, a finding that may shed new light on the remarkable rapidity of language processing
Syntactic REAP.PT: Exercises on Clitic Pronouning
The emerging interdisciplinary field of Intelligent Computer Assisted Language Learning (ICALL) aims to integrate the knowledge from computational linguistics into computer-assisted language learning (CALL). REAP.PT is a project emerging from this new field, aiming to teach Portuguese in an innovative and appealing way, and adapted to each student. In this paper, we present a new improvement of the REAP.PT system, consisting in developing new, automatically generated, syntactic exercises. These exercises deal with the complex phenomenon of pronominalization, that is, the substitution of a syntactic constituent with an adequate pronominal form. Though the transformation may seem simple, it involves complex lexical, syntactical and semantic constraints. The issues on pronominalization in Portuguese make it a particularly difficult aspect of language learning for non-native speakers. On the other hand, even native speakers can often be uncertain about the correct clitic positioning, due to the complexity and interaction of competing factors governing this phenomenon. A new architecture for automatic syntactic exercise generation is proposed. It proved invaluable in easing the development of this complex exercise, and is expected to make a relevant step forward in the development of future syntactic exercises, with the potential of becoming a syntactic exercise generation framework. A pioneer feedback system with detailed and automatically generated explanations for each answer is also presented, improving the learning experience, as stated in user comments. The expert evaluation and crowd-sourced testing positive results demonstrated the validity of the present approach
Learning to Reuse Distractors to support Multiple Choice Question Generation in Education
Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are widely used in digital learning systems,
as they allow for automating the assessment process. However, due to the
increased digital literacy of students and the advent of social media
platforms, MCQ tests are widely shared online, and teachers are continuously
challenged to create new questions, which is an expensive and time-consuming
task. A particularly sensitive aspect of MCQ creation is to devise relevant
distractors, i.e., wrong answers that are not easily identifiable as being
wrong. This paper studies how a large existing set of manually created answers
and distractors for questions over a variety of domains, subjects, and
languages can be leveraged to help teachers in creating new MCQs, by the smart
reuse of existing distractors. We built several data-driven models based on
context-aware question and distractor representations, and compared them with
static feature-based models. The proposed models are evaluated with automated
metrics and in a realistic user test with teachers. Both automatic and human
evaluations indicate that context-aware models consistently outperform a static
feature-based approach. For our best-performing context-aware model, on average
3 distractors out of the 10 shown to teachers were rated as high-quality
distractors. We create a performance benchmark, and make it public, to enable
comparison between different approaches and to introduce a more standardized
evaluation of the task. The benchmark contains a test of 298 educational
questions covering multiple subjects & languages and a 77k multilingual pool of
distractor vocabulary for future research.Comment: 24 pages and 4 figures Accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions
on Learning technologie
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