Using Neural Machine Translation for Generating Diverse Challenging Exercises for Language Learner
Frank Palma Gomez, Subhadarshi Panda, Michael Flor, Alla Rozovskaya
Abstract
We propose a novel approach to automatically generate distractors for cloze exercises for English language learners, using round-trip neural machine translation. A carrier sentence is translated from English into another (pivot) language and back, and distractors are produced by aligning the original sentence with its round-trip translation. We make use of 16 linguistically-diverse pivots and generate hundreds of translation hypotheses in each direction. We show that using hundreds of translations allows us to generate a rich set of challenging distractors. Moreover, we find that typologically unrelated language pivots contribute more diverse candidate distractors, compared to language pivots that are closely related. We further evaluate the use of machine translation systems of varying quality and find that better quality MT systems produce more challenging distractors. Finally, we conduct a study with language learners, demonstrating that the automatically generated distractors are of the same difficulty as the gold distractors produced by human experts.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.acl-long.337
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 6115–6129
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.337
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.337
- Cite (ACL):
- Frank Palma Gomez, Subhadarshi Panda, Michael Flor, and Alla Rozovskaya. 2023. Using Neural Machine Translation for Generating Diverse Challenging Exercises for Language Learner. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 6115–6129, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Using Neural Machine Translation for Generating Diverse Challenging Exercises for Language Learner (Palma Gomez et al., ACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2023.acl-long.337.pdf