Automatic Generation of Distractors for Fill-in-the-Blank Exercises with Round-Trip Neural Machine Translation
Subhadarshi Panda, Frank Palma Gomez, Michael Flor, Alla Rozovskaya
Abstract
In a fill-in-the-blank exercise, a student is presented with a carrier sentence with one word hidden, and a multiple-choice list that includes the correct answer and several inappropriate options, called distractors. We propose to automatically generate distractors using round-trip neural machine translation: the carrier sentence is translated from English into another (pivot) language and back, and distractors are produced by aligning the original sentence and its round-trip translation. We show that using hundreds of translations for a given sentence allows us to generate a rich set of challenging distractors. Further, using multiple pivot languages produces a diverse set of candidates. The distractors are evaluated against a real corpus of cloze exercises and checked manually for validity. We demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms two strong baselines.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.acl-srw.31
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Dublin, Ireland
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 391–401
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-srw.31
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2022.acl-srw.31
- Cite (ACL):
- Subhadarshi Panda, Frank Palma Gomez, Michael Flor, and Alla Rozovskaya. 2022. Automatic Generation of Distractors for Fill-in-the-Blank Exercises with Round-Trip Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pages 391–401, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Automatic Generation of Distractors for Fill-in-the-Blank Exercises with Round-Trip Neural Machine Translation (Panda et al., ACL 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nodalida-main-page/2022.acl-srw.31.pdf