Automatic Generation of English Vocabulary Tests

Abstract

This paper presents a novel method for automatically generating English vocabulary tests using TOEFL vocabulary questions as a model. English vocabulary questions in TOEFL is a multiple-choice question consisting of four components: a target word, a reading passage, a correct answer and distractors. Given a target word, we generate a reading passage from Web texts retrieved from the Internet, and then employ that reading passage and the WordNet lexical dictionary for generating question options, both the correct answer and distractors. Human evaluation indicated that 45% of the responses from English teachers mistakenly judged the automatically generated questions by the proposed method to be human-generated questions. In addition, half of the machine-generated questions were received average rating more than or equals than 3 in 5 point scale. This suggests that our machine-generated questions succeeded in capturing some characteristics of the human-generated questions, and half of them can be used for English test.