Improving the production efficiency and well-formedness of automatically-generated multiple-choice cloze vocabulary questions

Ralph L. Rose*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Multiple-choice cloze (fill-in-the-blank) questions are widely used in knowledge testing and are commonly used for testing vocabulary knowledge. Word Quiz Constructor (WQC) is a Java application that is designed to produce such test items automatically from the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000) and using various online and offline resources. The present work evaluates recently added features of WQC to see whether they improve the production quality and well-formedness of vocabulary quiz items over previously implemented features in WQC. Results of a production test and a well-formedness survey using Amazon Mechanical Turk show that newly-introduced features (Linsear Write readability formula and Google Books NGrams frequency list) significantly improve the production quality of items over previous features (Automated Readability Index and frequency list derived from the British Academic Written English corpus). Items are produced faster and stem sentences are shorter in length without clear degradation in their well-formedness. Nearly 90% of such items are judged well-formed, surpassing the rate of manually-produced items.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLREC 2020 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Conference Proceedings
EditorsNicoletta Calzolari, Frederic Bechet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages7094-7101
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9791095546344
Publication statusPublished - 2020
Event12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2020 - Marseille, France
Duration: 2020 May 112020 May 16

Publication series

NameLREC 2020 - 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, Conference Proceedings

Conference

Conference12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2020
Country/TerritoryFrance
CityMarseille
Period20/5/1120/5/16

Keywords

  • Automated test creation
  • Frequency list
  • Multiple-choice cloze
  • Readability formula
  • Vocabulary testing

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Education
  • Library and Information Sciences
  • Linguistics and Language

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