Ontologies provide a structured representation of concepts and the relationships which connect them. This work investigates how a pre-existing educational Biology ontology can be used to generate useful practice questions for students by using the connectivity structure in a novel way. It also introduces a novel way to generate multiple-choice distractors from the ontology, and compares this to a baseline of using embedding representations of nodes An assessment by an expenenced science teacher shows a significant advantage over a baseline when using the ontology for distractor generation A subsequent study with three science teachers on the results of a modified question generation algorithm finds significant improvements. An iri-depth analysis of the teachers' comments yields useful insights for any researcher working on automated question generation for educational applications.
展开▼
