To assess the knowledge proficiency of a learner, multiple choice question is an efficient and widespread form in standard tests. However, the composition of the multiple choice question, especially the construction of distractors is quite challenging. The distractors are required to both incorrect and plausible enough to confuse the learners who did not master the knowledge. Currently, the distractors are generated by domain experts which are both expensive and time-consuming. This urges the emergence of automatic distractor generation, which can benefit various standard tests in a wide range of domains. In this paper, we propose a question and answer guided distractor generation (EDGE) framework to automate distractor generation. EDGE consists of three major modules: (1) the Reforming Question Module and the Reforming Passage Module apply gate layers to guarantee the inherent incorrectness of the generated distractors; (2) the Distractor Generator Module applies attention mechanism to control the level of plausibility. Experimental results on a large-scale public dataset demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms existing models and achieves a new state-of-the-art.
University of Massachusetts, Lowell（马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校）；Xidian University（西安电子科技大学）
This paper presents a novel approach to automatic generation of adequate distractors for a given question-answer pair (QAP) generated from a given article to form an adequate multiple-choice question (MCQ). Our method is a combination of part-of-speech tagging, named-entity tagging, semantic-role labeling, regular expressions, domain knowledge bases, word embeddings, word edit distance, WordNet, and other algorithms. We use the US SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test) practice reading tests as a dataset to produce QAPs and generate three distractors for each QAP to form an MCQ. We show that, via ex…
Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science, Leiden University（莱顿大学莱顿高级计算机科学研究所）
For the field of education, being able to generate semantically correct and educationally relevant multiple choice questions (MCQs) could have a large impact. While question generation itself is an active research topic, generating distractors (the incorrect multiple choice options) receives much less attention. A missed opportunity, since there is still a lot of room for improvement in this area. In this work, we train a GPT-2 language model to generate three distractors for a given question and text context, using the RACE dataset. Next, we train a BERT language model to answer MCQs, and use…
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 th…
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 ans…
Distractor Generation in Multiple-Choice Tasks: A Survey of Methods, Datasets, and Evaluation
School of Computing, Macquarie University（麦考瑞大学计算学院）；College of Engineering and Computing in Al-Lith, Umm Al-Qura University（乌姆·古拉大学阿勒特工程与计算学院）；School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学计算机与数学科学学院）
Medical multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is particularly difficult. Questions may describe patient symptoms and ask for the correct diagnosis, which requires domain knowledge and complex reasoning. Standard language modeling pretraining alone is not sufficient to achieve the best results. \citet{jin2020disease} showed that focusing masked language modeling on disease name prediction when using medical encyclopedic paragraphs as input leads to considerable MCQA accuracy improvement. In this work, we show that (1) fine-tuning on generated MCQA dataset outperforms the masked language mod…
Arizona State University（亚利桑那州立大学）；Emory University（埃默里大学）
Multiple-choice VQA has drawn increasing attention from researchers and end-users recently. As the demand for automatically constructing large-scale multiple-choice VQA data grows, we introduce a novel task called textual Distractors Generation for VQA (DG-VQA) focusing on generating challenging yet meaningful distractors given the context image, question, and correct answer. The DG-VQA task aims at generating distractors without ground-truth training samples since such resources are rarely available. To tackle the DG-VQA unsupervisedly, we propose Gobbet, a reinforcement learning(RL) based fr…
An important part when constructing multiple-choice questions (MCQs) for reading comprehension assessment are the distractors, the incorrect but preferably plausible answer options. In this paper, we present a new BERT-based method for automatically generating distractors using only a small-scale dataset. We also release a new such dataset of Swedish MCQs (used for training the model), and propose a methodology for assessing the generated distractors. Evaluation shows that from a student's perspective, our method generated one or more plausible distractors for more than 50% of the MCQs in our …
Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
In reading comprehension, generating sentence-level distractors is a significant task, which requires a deep understanding of the article and question. The traditional entity-centered methods can only generate word-level or phrase-level distractors. Although recently proposed neural-based methods like sequence-to-sequence (Seq2Seq) model show great potential in generating creative text, the previous neural methods for distractor generation ignore two important aspects. First, they didn't model the interactions between the article and question, making the generated distractors tend to be too ge…
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）；Alibaba DAMO Academy（阿里巴巴达摩院）
We investigate the task of distractor generation for multiple choice reading comprehension questions from examinations. In contrast to all previous works, we do not aim at preparing words or short phrases distractors, instead, we endeavor to generate longer and semantic-rich distractors which are closer to distractors in real reading comprehension from examinations. Taking a reading comprehension article, a pair of question and its correct option as input, our goal is to generate several distractors which are somehow related to the answer, consistent with the semantic context of the question a…
Graduate School of Artificial Intelligence, POSTECH, South Korea（韩国立科学技术院人工智能研究生院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, POSTECH, South Korea（韩国立科学技术院计算机科学与工程系）；Mila Quebec AI Institute, Canada（魁北克AI研究院）；McGill University, Canada（麦吉尔大学）
Beyond Fine-Tuning: In-Context Learning and Chain-of-Thought for Reasoned Distractor Generation
School of Computing, Macquarie University, Australia（麦考瑞大学计算机学院，澳大利亚）；School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, Adelaide University, Australia（阿德莱德大学计算机与数学科学学院，澳大利亚）；College of Engineering and Computing in Al-Lith, Umm Al-Qura University, Saudi Arabia（乌姆·阿尔·库拉大学阿尔·利思工程与计算学院，沙特阿拉伯）
In this paper, we investigate the following two limitations for the existing distractor generation (DG) methods. First, the quality of the existing DG methods are still far from practical use. There is still room for DG quality improvement. Second, the existing DG designs are mainly for single distractor generation. However, for practical MCQ preparation, multiple distractors are desired. Aiming at these goals, in this paper, we present a new distractor generation scheme with multi-tasking and negative answer training strategies for effectively generating \textit{multiple} distractors. The exp…
Structure-Aware Modeling of Multiple-Choice Questions Improves Automatic Difficulty Estimation
Centro de Investigación Avanzada en Educación (CIAE), Instituto de Estudios Avanzados en Educación (IE), Universidad de Chile（智利大学高级教育研究中心（CIAE），高级教育研究所（IE））；Departamento de Evaluación, Medición y Registro Educacional (DEMRE), Universidad de Chile（智利大学评估、测量与教育注册系（DEMRE））；Centro de Modelamiento Matemático (CMM), Universidad de Chile（智利大学数学建模中心（CMM））；Departamento de Ingeniería Matemática (DIM), Universidad de Chile（智利大学数学工程系（DIM））
We introduce a high-quality dataset that contains 3,397 samples comprising (i) multiple choice questions, (ii) answers (including distractors), and (iii) their source documents, from the educational domain. Each question is phrased in two forms, normal and close. Correct answers are linked to source documents with sentence-level annotations. Thus, our versatile dataset can be used for both question and distractor generation, as well as to explore new challenges such as question format conversion. Furthermore, 903 questions are accompanied by their cognitive complexity level as per Bloom's taxo…
Creating multiple-choice questions to assess reading comprehension of a given article involves generating question-answer pairs (QAPs) and adequate distractors. We present two methods to tackle the challenge of QAP generations: (1) A deep-learning-based end-to-end question generation system based on T5 Transformer with Preprocessing and Postprocessing Pipelines (TP3). We use the finetuned T5 model for our downstream task of question generation and improve accuracy using a combination of various NLP tools and algorithms in preprocessing and postprocessing to select appropriate answers and filte…
Wangxuan Institute of Computer Technology, Peking University（北京大学王选计算机研究所）；The MOE Key Laboratory of Computational Linguistics, Peking University（北京大学计算语言学教育部重点实验室）
A riddle is a question or statement with double or veiled meanings, followed by an unexpected answer. Solving riddle is a challenging task for both machine and human, testing the capability of understanding figurative, creative natural language and reasoning with commonsense knowledge. We introduce BiRdQA, a bilingual multiple-choice question answering dataset with 6614 English riddles and 8751 Chinese riddles. For each riddle-answer pair, we provide four distractors with additional information from Wikipedia. The distractors are automatically generated at scale with minimal bias. Existing mon…
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
We present a novel method for obtaining high-quality, domain-targeted multiple choice questions from crowd workers. Generating these questions can be difficult without trading away originality, relevance or diversity in the answer options. Our method addresses these problems by leveraging a large corpus of domain-specific text and a small set of existing questions. It produces model suggestions for document selection and answer distractor choice which aid the human question generation process. With this method we have assembled SciQ, a dataset of 13.7K multiple choice science exam questions (D…
Corpus Prevalence of Multiple-Choice Question Options
Center for Language and Cognition, University of Groningen（语言与认知中心，格罗宁根大学）；Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Groningen（实验心理学系，格罗宁根大学）
Cornell University（康奈尔大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Machine reading comprehension tasks require a machine reader to answer questions relevant to the given document. In this paper, we present the first free-form multiple-Choice Chinese machine reading Comprehension dataset (C^3), containing 13,369 documents (dialogues or more formally written mixed-genre texts) and their associated 19,577 multiple-choice free-form questions collected from Chinese-as-a-second-language examinations. We present a comprehensive analysis of the prior knowledge (i.e., linguistic, domain-specific, and general world knowledge) needed for these real-world problems. We im…
Open-domain question answering (QA) is known to involve several underlying knowledge and reasoning challenges, but are models actually learning such knowledge when trained on benchmark tasks? To investigate this, we introduce several new challenge tasks that probe whether state-of-the-art QA models have general knowledge about word definitions and general taxonomic reasoning, both of which are fundamental to more complex forms of reasoning and are widespread in benchmark datasets. As an alternative to expensive crowd-sourcing, we introduce a methodology for automatically building datasets from…
