Generation of english question answer exercises from texts using transformers based models

Abstract

This paper studies the use of NLP techniques, in particular, neural language models, for the generation of question/answer exercises from English texts. The experiments aim to generate beginner-level exercises from simple texts, to be used in teaching ESL (English as a Second Language) to children. The approach we present in this paper is based on four stages: a pre-processing stage that, among other basic tasks, applies a co-reference resolution tool; an answer candidate selection stage, which is based on semantic role labeling; a question generation stage, which takes as input the text with the resolved co-references and returns a set of questions for each answer candidate using a language model based on the Transformers architecture; and a post-processing stage that adjusts the format of the generated questions. The question generation model was evaluated on a benchmark obtaining similar results to those of previous works, and the complete pipeline was evaluated on a corpus specifically created for this task, achieving good results.