It is costly and time consuming to develop Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) by hand. Using web-based resources to automate components of MCQ development would greatly benefit the education community through reducing reduplication of effort. Similar to many areas of Natural Language Processing (NLP), human-judged data is needed to train automated systems, but the majority of such data is proprietary. We present a graph-based representation for gathering training data from existing, web-based resources that increases access to such data and better directs the development of good questions.

The current study investigates the relationship between children’s curiosity and question asking ability. Generation of two types of questions was assessed: identification (yes/no questions asked to identify a target from an array) and understanding questions, asked to learn more about a topic. The latter was related to children’s curiosity, as was the ability to recognize the effectiveness of questions in solving a mystery. Training on asking identification questions was effective in improving children’s ability to ask that type of question, but did not transfer to the other task. Training on asking understanding questions was not successful. Children’s curiosity did not influence the effectiveness of the training.

This paper discusses the implementation and evaluation of automatically generated cloze questions in the style of the definitions found in Collins COBUILD English language learner’s dictionary. The definitions and the cloze questions are used in an automated reading tutor to help second and third grade students learn new vocabulary. A parser provides syntactic phrase structure trees for the definitions. With these parse trees as input, a pattern matching program uses a set of syntactic patterns to extract the phrases that make up the cloze question answers and distracters.

This paper shows that automatically generated questions can help classify children’s spoken responses to a reading tutor teaching them to generate their own questions. We use automatic question generation to model and classify children’s prompted spoken questions about stories. On distinguishing complete and incomplete questions from irrelevant speech and silence, a language model built from automatically generated questions out-performs a trigram language model that does not exploit the structure of questions.

This paper describes a prototype system that generates mathematical word problems from ontologies in unrestricted domains. It builds on an existing ontology verbaliser that renders logical statements written in Web Ontology Language (OWL) as English sentences. This kind of question is more complex than those normally attempted by question generation systems, since mathematical word problems consist of a number of sentences that communicate a short narrative (in addition to providing the relevant numerical information required to solve the underlying mathematical problem). Thus, they embody many research issues that do not crop up with single-sentence questions. As well as describing the prototype system, I discuss five ways in which the difficulty of the generated questions may be controlled automatically during generation.

Good readers ask questions during reading, and this is presumed to improve their text comprehension. But what about not-so-good readers? Does question asking promote comprehension for struggling readers and, if so, how can we best support these students? This paper examines question generation among low-performing sixth-graders who read moderately-challenging science texts. It characterizes the nature of students’ questions and describes the effects of a video-based peer modeling intervention on their question asking and reading comprehension. In contrast to previous research, this study found that students asked a large number of deep reasoning questions, particularly those related to identifying goals, processes, causes, and consequences. However, such questions were not generally associated with greater understanding. Only two types of deep reasoning questions were related to text comprehension—those that were not answered in the text (directly or indirectly) and those that students labeled as “I’m Confused” questions. The study also found that readers who were exposed to video-based peer modeling of question generation asked more of these types of questions and scored significantly higher on multiple measures of text comprehension. These findings have implications for the design of systems to support struggling readers and for theory-building about question generation.

Automated question generation has been explored for a broad range of tasks. However, an important task for which limited work on question generation has been undertaken is writing support. Writing support systems, particularly for novice writers who are acquiring the fundamentals of writing, can scaffold the complex processes that bear on writing. Novice writers face significant challenges in creative writing. Their stories often lack the expressive prose that characterizes texts produced by their expert writer counterparts. A story that is composed by a novice writer may also lack a compelling plot, may not effectively utilize a story’s setting, characters, and props, and may describe events that play out in an unpredictable or confusing order. We propose an automatic question generation framework that is designed to stimulate the cognitive processes associated with creative writing. The framework utilizes semantic role labeling and discourse parsing applied to the initial drafts of the writer’s passage to generate questions to promote creativity.

We present an evaluation methodology and a system for ranking questions within the context of a multimodal tutorial dialogue. Such a framework has applications for automatic question selection and generation in intelligent tutoring systems. To create this ranking system we manually author candidate questions for specific points in a dialogue and have raters assign scores to these questions. To explore the role of question type in scoring, we annotate dialogue turns with labels from the DISCUSS dialogue move taxonomy. Questions are ranked using a SVM-regression model trained with features extracted from the dialogue context, the candidate question, and the human ratings. Evaluation shows that our system’s rankings correlate with human judgments in question ranking.

We present a bi-threshold model of complex contagion in networks. In this model a node in a network can be in one of two states at any time step, and changes state if enough of its neighbors are in the opposite state, as determined by “up-threshold” and “down-threshold” parameters. This dynamical process models several types of social contagion processes, such as public health concerns and the spread of games on online networks. Motivated by recent literature calling for the investigation of peer pressure to reduce obesity, which can be viewed as a control problem of population dynamics, we focus on the computational complexity of finding critical sets of nodes, which are nodes that we choose to freeze in state 0 (a desirable state) in order to inhibit the spread of an undesirable state 1 in the network. We define a minimum-cost critical set problem and show that it is NP-complete for bi-threshold systems. We show that several versions of the problem can be approximated to within a factor of O(log n), where n is the number of nodes in the network. Using the ideas behind these approximations, we devise a heuristic, called the Maximum Contributor Heuristic (MCH), which can be used even when the diffusion model is probabilistic. We perform simulations with well-known networks from the literature and show that MCH outperforms the High Degree Heuristic by several orders of magnitude.

Simulation techniques have long sustained research in various domains of physical, biological, and social sciences. Currently, humanists are exploring the usefulness of simulations for addressing various research questions. The nature and challenges of this enterprise are presented here in respect to collaborative work, the relation of humanities to the sciences, the transformative nature of digital methods of research within the humanities. This article describes a coordinated attempt to pursue these issues via a Summer Institute funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and briefly notes the projects of three of the Institute’s participants. Their work is described in detail elsewhere within this volume.