Multiple-choice question generation with auto-generated distractors for computer-assisted educational assessment

Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are used as instrumental tool for assessment, not only in various competitive examinations but also in contemporary information and communications Technology (ICT)-based education, active learning, etc. Therefore, automatic generation of multiple-choice test items from text-based learning material is a truly demanding task in computer aided-assessment. A lot of systems were developed in the past two decades for this purpose, but the system generated questions have failed to satisfy the needs of computer-based automated assessment. As a consequence, this is still an open area of research in education technology and natural language processing. This article presents an automated system for generating multiple-choice test items with distractors. The system first selects informative sentences using the topic-words or keywords (one or more words). The best keyword from a selected sentence is chosen as an answer key. Next, the system eliminates the answer key from this sentence and transforms it into a question-sentence (stem). The wrong options or distractors are generated automatically using a feature-based clustering approach, without using any external information or knowledge-base. The result highlights the efficiency of the proposed system for generating MCQs with distractors.