A Cloze Test Authoring System and Its Automation

Overview

This paper presents a pilot system and discusses its possible extensions. The paper presents a web-based test authoring system for English grammar and vocabulary. It assists language teachers to make questions on arbitrary input texts, such as online news. The system employs the techniques of NLP (Natural Language Processing) and is compared with other studies in the same field. In the latter sections the paper discusses some extensions of the system. It shows a method of automatically acquiring the grammar targets and discusses an extension to a computer-adaptive question generator which interacts with students. The paper also describes the design of the extended system and focus on the difficulty predictor, one of the major components needed.