@InProceedings{ha-yaneva:2018:W18-05,
  author    = {Ha, Le An  and  Yaneva, Victoria},
  title     = {Automatic Distractor Suggestion for Multiple-Choice Tests Using Concept Embeddings and Information Retrieval},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications},
  month     = {June},
  year      = {2018},
  address   = {New Orleans, Louisiana},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {389--398},
  abstract  = {Developing plausible distractors (wrong answer options) when writing multiple-choice questions has been described as one of the most challenging and time-consuming parts of the item-writing process. In this paper we propose a fully automatic method for generating distractor suggestions for multiple-choice questions used in high-stakes medical exams. The system uses a question stem and the correct answer as an input and produces a list of suggested distractors ranked based on their similarity to the stem and the correct answer. To do this we use a novel approach of combining concept embeddings with information retrieval methods. We frame the evaluation as a prediction task where we aim to “predict” the human-produced distractors used in large sets of medical questions, i.e. if a distractor generated by our system is good enough it is likely to feature among the list of distractors produced by the human item-writers. The results reveal that combining concept embeddings with information retrieval approaches significantly improves the generation of plausible distractors and enables us to match around 1 in 5 of the human-produced distractors. The approach proposed in this paper is generalisable to all scenarios where the distractors refer to concepts.},
  url       = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W18-0548}
}