Knowledge-Driven Distractor Generation for Cloze-style Multiple Choice Questions

Siyu Ren, Kenny Q. Zhu

Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel configurable framework to automatically generate distractive choices for open-domain cloze-style multiple-choice questions, which incorporates a general-purpose knowledge base to effectively create a small distractor candidate set, and a feature-rich learning-to-rank model to select distractors that are both plausible and reliable. Experimental results on datasets across four domains show that our framework yields distractors that are more plausible and reliable than previous methods. This dataset can also be used as a benchmark for distractor generation in the future.