Sreecharan Sankaranarayanan


2016

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Generating Questions and Multiple-Choice Answers using Semantic Analysis of Texts
Jun Araki | Dheeraj Rajagopal | Sreecharan Sankaranarayanan | Susan Holm | Yukari Yamakawa | Teruko Mitamura
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

We present a novel approach to automated question generation that improves upon prior work both from a technology perspective and from an assessment perspective. Our system is aimed at engaging language learners by generating multiple-choice questions which utilize specific inference steps over multiple sentences, namely coreference resolution and paraphrase detection. The system also generates correct answers and semantically-motivated phrase-level distractors as answer choices. Evaluation by human annotators indicates that our approach requires a larger number of inference steps, which necessitate deeper semantic understanding of texts than a traditional single-sentence approach.