descriptions. Descriptions of both types have an informational value which is mutually comparable and indicates the semantic distance from the true and most specific description of the actual situation. We developed several strategies to generate the most efficient sequence of questions to determine a situation. The choice of strategy depends on the assumptions that can be made about the domain...

This article describes a new tool for extracting question-answer pairs from text articles, and reports three experiments that investigate how suitable this technique is for supplying knowledge to conversational characters. Experiment 1 demonstrates the feasibility of our method by creating characters for 14 distinct topics and evaluating them using hand-authored questions. Experiment 2 evaluate...

In the REAP system, users are automatically provided with texts to read targeted to their individual reading levels. To find appropriate texts, the user’s vocabulary knowledge must be assessed. We describe an approach to automatically generating questions for vocabulary assessment. Traditionally, these assessments have been hand-written. Using data from WordNet, we generate 6 types of vocabular...

Texts with potential educational value are becoming available through the Internet (e.g., Wikipedia, news services). However, using these new texts in classrooms introduces many challenges, one of which is that they usually lack practice exercises and assessments. Here, we address part of this challenge by automating the creation of a specific type of assessment item. Specifically, we focus on ...

In the ongoing CODA project, we are developing a system for automatically converting monologue into dialogue. The dialogue is generated in a two-step approach. Firstly, snippets of input monologue are mapped to dialogue act sequences. Secondly, these sequences are verbalized. The conversion relies partly on analysing input monologue in terms of its discourse relations. This short paper briefly ...

Linguistic patterns reflect the regularities of Natural Language and their applicability is acknowledged in several Natural Language Processing tasks. Particularly, in the task of Question Generation, many systems depend on patterns to generate questions from text. The approach we follow relies on patterns that convey lexical, syntactic and semantic information, automatically learned from large...

We propose that the task of question generation should incorporate not only measures of grammaticality, but also a measure of the importance of a question automatically generated. Necessarily, importance of a given question can be judged only in context, so we propose that the data for a shared task be larger than a single sentence, data point or statement in a knowledge base. By focusing on th...

In this paper, we present a system that automatically generates questions from natural language text using discourse connectives. We explore the usefulness of the discourse connectives for Question Generation (QG) that looks at the problem beyond sentence level. Our work divides the QG task into content selection and question formation. Content selection consists of finding the relevant part in...

This paper presents a question generation system based on the approach of semantic rewriting. State-of-the-art deep linguistic parsing and generation tools are employed to map natural language sentences into their meaning representations in the form of Minimal Recursion Semantics (mrs) and vice versa. By carefully operating on the semantic structures, we obtain a principled way of generating qu...

The goal of my doctoral thesis is to automatically generate interrogative sentences from descriptive sentences of Turkish biology text. We employ syntactic and semantic approaches to parse descriptive sentences. Syntactic and semantic approaches utilize syntactic (constituent or dependency) parsing and semantic role labeling systems respectively. After parsing step, question statements whose an...