Abstract
This paper presents a web-based automatic question generation (AQG) system to generate reading comprehension questions and multiple-choice (MC) questions on grammar from a given English text. Such system saves teachers’ time on setting questions and facilitates students and their parents to prepare self-learning exercises. Our web-based system can automatically generate Wh-questions (i.e., what, who, when, where, why, and how) and MC grammar questions of selected sentences. Wh-questions can also be generated from user-specified answer phrases. The generation of Wh-questions exploits the pre-trained natural language understanding model, Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer (T5), and an adapted version of the SQuAD 2.0 machine reading comprehension dataset. The generation of MC questions involves identifying regular verbs in a text and using the verb’s lexemes as the answer choices. Our system takes an average time of about 1 s to generate a Wh-question and it generates a MC question almost instantly. User evaluation indicated that our system is easy-to-use and satisfactory in usefulness, usability, and quality, revealing the effectiveness of our system for teachers and parents.
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Fung, YC., Kwok, J.CW., Lee, LK., Chui, K.T., U, L.H. (2020). Automatic Question Generation System for English Reading Comprehension. In: Lee, LK., U, L.H., Wang, F.L., Cheung, S.K.S., Au, O., Li, K.C. (eds) Technology in Education. Innovations for Online Teaching and Learning. ICTE 2020. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1302. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-4594-2_12
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