Distractor generation for multiple choice questions using learning to rank

Chen Liang, Xiao Yang, Neisarg Dave, Drew Wham, Bart Pursel, C. Lee Giles

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

57 Scopus citations

Abstract

We investigate how machine learning models, specifically ranking models, can be used to select useful distractors for multiple choice questions. Our proposed models can learn to select distractors that resemble those in actual exam questions, which is different from most existing unsupervised ontology-based and similarity-based methods. We empirically study feature-based and neural net (NN) based ranking models with experiments on the recently released SciQ dataset and our MCQL dataset. Experimental results show that feature-based ensemble learning methods (random forest and LambdaMART) outperform both the NN-based method and unsupervised baselines. These two datasets can also be used as benchmarks for distractor generation.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 13th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, BEA 2018 at the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Subtitle of host publicationHuman Language Technologies, NAACL-HTL 2018
EditorsJoel Tetreault, Jill Burstein, Ekaterina Kochmar, Claudia Leacock, Helen Yannakoudakis
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages284-290
Number of pages7
ISBN (Electronic)9781948087117
StatePublished - 2018
Event13th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, BEA 2018 at the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HTL 2018 - New Orleans, United States
Duration: Jun 5 2018 → …

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 13th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, BEA 2018 at the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HTL 2018

Conference

Conference13th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, BEA 2018 at the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HTL 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Orleans
Period6/5/18 → …

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Language and Linguistics
  • Linguistics and Language

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