Automatic fill-the-blank question generator for student self-assessment

Today's educational systems require students to recall and apply major concepts from study material to perform competently in assessments. Crucial to achieving this is practice and self-assessment through questions. The crafting of such questions can be time consuming for teachers while questions from external sources, e.g. assessment books, might not be tailored to suit students' study materials. As such, we present RevUP: an automated system for Gap-Fill Question Generation (GFQG) from educational texts. Example GFQs generated by RevUP from a high-school biology textbook are as follows. • Endocrine signals generated by the hypothalamus regulate hormone secretion by the _____. (a) posterior pituitary (b) anterior pituitary (c) thyroid gland (d) pineal gland Our system factors the problem of generating good questions into 3 parts: 1) Selecting topically important sentences to ask about 2) Identifying which part of the resulting sentence to choose as the gap 3) Crafting effective distractors to be part of the set of options to confuse the learner The immediate advantage of this service is that it provides the tools that make it easy for teachers to quickly generate and edit questions for pop quizzes and worksheets from their lecture notes. In the paper, we will provide a detailed description of the methodology used to generate questions. We will also provide preliminary usability statistics from high school students where they qualified the usability and the negative aspects of the application.