Building an Agent for Factual Question Generation Task

With the boom of e-learning and online education systems, also question generation systems have become more interesting. Nowadays, it is relatively common and simple to use internet and web technologies for learning. There are many sources of educational materials in various formats like text, audio, video or interactive applications and games. But the automatic evaluation and confirmation of students’ knowledge is still difficult. In this paper, we describe our endeavour to design and create an interactive educational agent which to some extent acts as a teacher: it automatically generates factual questions from the educational text and tries to reveal if the student understood the information presented there. We have evaluated our agent in comparison with state-of-the-art question generation systems. In order to assess the applicability of generated questions in educational process we have also compared these questions with those expected by the students.

Blstak, M., Rozinajova, V. – IEEE World Symposium on Digital Intelligence for Systems and Machines, 2018