Multiple Choice Question Generation Utilizing An Ontology
Katherine Stasaski, Marti A. Hearst · 2017
Ontologies provide a structured representation of concepts and the relationships which connect them.This work investigates how a pre-existing educational Biology ontology can be used to generate useful practice questions for students by using the connectivity structure in a novel way.It also introduces a novel way to generate multiple-choice distractors from the ontology, and compares this to a baseline of using embedding representations of nodes.An assessment by an experienced science teacher shows a significant advantage over a baseline when using the ontology for distractor generation.A subsequent study with three science teachers on the results of a modified question generation algorithm finds significant improvements.An in-depth analysis of the teachers' comments yields useful insights for any researcher working on automated question generation for educational applications.