Question Generation via Overgenerating Transformations and Ranking

Abstract

We describe an extensible approach to generating questions for the purpose of reading comprehension assessment and practice. Our framework for question generation composes general-purpose rules to transform declarative sentences into questions, is modular in that existing NLP tools can be leveraged, and includes a statistical component for scoring questions based on features of the input, output, and transformations performed. In an evaluation in which humans rated questions according to several criteria, we found that our implementation achieves 43.3% acceptability for the top 10 ranked questions, and generates approximately 6.8 acceptable questions per 250 words of source text.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2009
Accession Number
ADA531042

Entities

People

  • Michael Heilman
  • Noah A. Smith

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acceptability
  • Agreements
  • Automated Text Summarization
  • Comprehension
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Science
  • Demographic Cohorts
  • Education
  • Language
  • Linguistics
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Natural Languages
  • Standards
  • Students
  • Test And Evaluation
  • Test Sets

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computational Linguistics
  • Instructional Design and Training Evaluation.