BERT-based distractor generation for Swedish reading comprehension questions using a small-scale dataset

Dmytro Kalpakchi; Johan Boye

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arXiv · 2108.03973

BERT-based distractor generation for Swedish reading comprehension questions using a small-scale dataset

Dmytro Kalpakchi·Johan Boye

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Abstract

An important part when constructing multiple-choice questions (MCQs) for reading comprehension assessment are the distractors, the incorrect but preferably plausible answer options. In this paper, we present a new BERT-based method for automatically generating distractors using only a small-scale dataset. We also release a new such dataset of Swedish MCQs (used for training the model), and propose a methodology for assessing the generated distractors. Evaluation shows that from a student's perspective, our method generated one or more plausible distractors for more than 50% of the MCQs in our test set. From a teacher's perspective, about 50% of the generated distractors were deemed appropriate. We also do a thorough analysis of the results.

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Dmytro Kalpakchi, Johan Boye. 2021-08-09. BERT-based distractor generation for Swedish reading comprehension questions using a small-scale dataset. https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.03973

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