Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are an efficient and common way to assess reading comprehension (RC). Every MCQ needs a set of distractor answers that are incorrect, but plausible enough to test student knowledge. Distractor generation (DG) models have been proposed, and their performance is typically evaluated using machine translation (MT) metrics. However, MT metrics often misjudge the suitability of generated distractors. We propose DISTO: the first learned evaluation metric for generated distractors. We validate DISTO by showing its scores correlate highly with human ratings of distractor quality. At the same time, DISTO ranks the performance of stateof-the-art Figure 1: A multi-choice question example from the DG models very differently from RACE dataset (Lai et al., 2017). The generated distractors MT-based metrics, showing that MT metrics were produced using a T5 model. Though the should not be used for distractor evaluation.

Maximum entropy analysis of binary variables provides an elegant way for studying the role of pairwise correlations in neural populations. Unfortunately, these approaches suffer from their poor scalability to high dimensions. In sensory coding, however, high-dimensional data is ubiquitous. Here, we introduce a new approach using a near-maximum entropy model, that makes this type of analysis feasible for very high-dimensional data--the model parameters can be derived in closed form and sampling is easy. Therefore, our NearMaxEnt approach can serve as a tool for testing predictions from a pairwise maximum entropy model not only for low-dimensional marginals, but also for high dimensional measurements of more than thousand units. We demonstrate its usefulness by studying natural images with dichotomized pixel intensities. Our results indicate that the statistics of such higher-dimensional measurements exhibit additional structure that are not predicted by pairwise correlations, despite the fact that pairwise correlations explain the lower-dimensional marginal statistics surprisingly well up to the limit of dimensionality where estimation of the full joint distribution is feasible.

Maximum entropy analysis of binary variables provides an elegant way for studying the role of pairwise correlations in neural populations. Unfortunately, these approaches suffer from their poor scalability to high dimensions. In sensory coding, however, high-dimensional data is ubiquitous. Here, we introduce a new approach using a near-maximum entropy model, that makes this type of analysis feasible for very high-dimensional data--the model parameters can be derived in closed form and sampling is easy. Therefore, our NearMaxEnt approach can serve as a tool for testing predictions from a pairwise maximum entropy model not only for low-dimensional marginals, but also for high dimensional measurements of more than thousand units. We demonstrate its usefulness by studying natural images with dichotomized pixel intensities. Our results indicate that the statistics of such higher-dimensional measurements exhibit additional structure that are not predicted by pairwise correlations, despite the fact that pairwise correlations explain the lower-dimensional marginal statistics surprisingly well up to the limit of dimensionality where estimation of the full joint distribution is feasible.

Maximum entropy analysis of binary variables provides an elegant way for studying therole of pairwise correlations in neural populations. Unfortunately, these approaches suffer from their poor scalability to high dimensions. In sensory coding, however,high-dimensional data is ubiquitous. Here, we introduce a new approach using a near-maximum entropy model, that makes this type of analysis feasiblefor very high-dimensional data--the model parameters can be derived in closed form and sampling is easy. Therefore, our NearMaxEnt approach can serve as a tool for testing predictions from a pairwise maximum entropy model not only for low-dimensional marginals, but also for high dimensional measurements of more than thousand units. We demonstrate its usefulness by studying natural images with dichotomized pixel intensities. Our results indicate that the statistics of such higher-dimensional measurements exhibit additional structure that are not predicted by pairwise correlations, despite the fact that pairwise correlations explain thelower-dimensional marginal statistics surprisingly well up to the limit of dimensionality where estimation of the full joint distribution is feasible.