@inproceedings{stasaski-hearst-2017-multiple,
    title = "Multiple Choice Question Generation Utilizing An Ontology",
    author = "Stasaski, Katherine  and
      Hearst, Marti A.",
    editor = "Tetreault, Joel  and
      Burstein, Jill  and
      Leacock, Claudia  and
      Yannakoudakis, Helen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on Innovative Use of {NLP} for Building Educational Applications",
    month = sep,
    year = "2017",
    address = "Copenhagen, Denmark",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/W17-5034/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/W17-5034",
    pages = "303--312",
    abstract = "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."
}