Learning from partially annotated data : example-aware creation of gap-filling exercises for language learning

Publication type
C1
Publication status
Published
Authors
Bitew, S., Deleu, J., Doğruöz, A.S., Develder, C., & Demeester, T.
Editor
Ekaterina Kochmar, Jill Burstein, Andrea Horbach, Ronja Laarmann-Quante, Nitin Madnani, Anaïs Tack, Victoria Yaneva, Zheng Yuan and Torsten Zesch
Series
Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications (BEA 2023)
Pagination
598-609
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (Toronto)
Conference
BEA2023, the 18th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications at ACL 2023 (Toronto, Canada)
Download
(.pdf)
View in Biblio
(externe link)

Abstract

Since performing exercises (including, e.g.,practice tests) forms a crucial component oflearning, and creating such exercises requiresnon-trivial effort from the teacher. There is agreat value in automatic exercise generationin digital tools in education. In this paper, weparticularly focus on automatic creation of gap-filling exercises for language learning, specifi-cally grammar exercises. Since providing anyannotation in this domain requires human ex-pert effort, we aim to avoid it entirely and ex-plore the task of converting existing texts intonew gap-filling exercises, purely based on anexample exercise, without explicit instructionor detailed annotation of the intended gram-mar topics. We contribute (i) a novel neuralnetwork architecture specifically designed foraforementioned gap-filling exercise generationtask, and (ii) a real-world benchmark datasetfor French grammar. We show that our modelfor this French grammar gap-filling exercisegeneration outperforms a competitive baselineclassifier by 8% in F1 percentage points, achiev-ing an average F1 score of 82%. Our model im-plementation and the dataset are made publiclyavailable to foster future research, thus offeringa standardized evaluation and baseline solutionof the proposed partially annotated data predic-tion task in grammar exercise creation.