A Question Example Generation System for Multiple Choice Tests by utilizing Concept Similarity in Korean WordNet

ABSTRACT We implemented a system being able to suggest example sentences for multiple choice tests, considering the level of students. To build the system, we designed an automatic method for sentence generation, which made it possible to control the difficulty degree of questions. For the proper evaluation in the multiple choice tests, proper size of question pools is required. To satisfy this requirement, a system which can generate various and numerous questions and their example sentences in a fast way should be used. In this paper, we designed an automatic generation method using a linguistic resource called WordNet. For the automatic generation, firstly, we extracted keywords from the existing sentences with the morphological analysis and candidate terms with similar meaning to the keywords in Korean WordNet space are suggested. When suggesting candidate terms, we transformed the existing Korean WordNet scheme into a new scheme to construct the concept similarity matrix. The similarity degree between concepts can be ranged from 0, representing synonyms relationships, to 9, representing non-connected relationships. By using the degree, we can control the difficulty degree of newly generated questions. We used two methods for evaluating semantic similarity between two concepts. The first one is considering only the distance between two concepts and the second one additionally considers positions of two concepts in the Korean Wordnet space. With these methods, we can build a system which can help the instructors generate new questions and their example sentences with various contents and difficulty degree from existing sentences more easily.Keyword:Question Example Generation System, Korean WordNet, Concept Similarity, Difficulty Degree of Questions