Automatic generation of cloze items for prepositions

Fill-in-the-blank questions, or cloze items, are commonly used in language learning applications. The benefits of personalized items, tailored to the user’s interest and proficiency, have motivated research on automatic generation of cloze items. This paper is concerned with generating cloze items for prepositions, whose usage often poses problems for non-native speakers of English. The quality of a cloze item depends on the choice of distractors. We propose two methods, based on collocations and on non-native English corpora, to generate distractors for prepositions. Both methods are found to be more successful in attracting users than a baseline that relies only on word frequency, a common criterion in past research.