Carrier Sentence Selection for Fill-in-the-blank Items

Shu Jiang, John Lee


Abstract
Fill-in-the-blank items are a common form of exercise in computer-assisted language learning systems. To automatically generate an effective item, the system must be able to select a high-quality carrier sentence that illustrates the usage of the target word. Previous approaches for carrier sentence selection have considered sentence length, vocabulary difficulty, the position of the target word and the presence of finite verbs. This paper investigates the utility of word co-occurrence statistics and lexical similarity as selection criteria. In an evaluation on generating fill-in-the-blank items for learning Chinese as a foreign language, we show that these two criteria can improve carrier sentence quality.
Anthology ID:
W17-5903
Volume:
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications (NLPTEA 2017)
Month:
December
Year:
2017
Address:
Taipei, Taiwan
Editors:
Yuen-Hsien Tseng, Hsin-Hsi Chen, Lung-Hao Lee, Liang-Chih Yu
Venue:
NLP-TEA
SIG:
Publisher:
Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing
Note:
Pages:
17–22
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5903
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shu Jiang and John Lee. 2017. Carrier Sentence Selection for Fill-in-the-blank Items. In Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Natural Language Processing Techniques for Educational Applications (NLPTEA 2017), pages 17–22, Taipei, Taiwan. Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing.
Cite (Informal):
Carrier Sentence Selection for Fill-in-the-blank Items (Jiang & Lee, NLP-TEA 2017)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W17-5903.pdf