Assessment-styled questions are an elemental tool serving a variety of purposes in the education sector. Questioning techniques are actively used in academia where answering questions help learners to identify gaps in knowledge and improve their understanding of where they stand. An effective Intelligent Questionnaire technique is not only an important evaluation tool but is also critical for learner engagement. For students and learners, it provides an excellent opportunity for self-assessment, whereas for publishers, institutions, and tutors it helps in generating assessments and quizzes. Apart from that, it facilitates adaptive learning platforms to build their courses and modules.
Traditionally, building a manual question takes a significant amount of effort and time from Subject Matter Experts. Moreover, a larger pool of questions is required due to the increasing growth of e-learning technologies such as online classes and adaptive learning, apart from the regular educational assessments which are difficult to generate every time. To simplify the process and generate a large number of high-quality questions, Automatic Question Generation techniques have emerged as a solution to these challenges.
Automatic Question Generation (AQG) and its Benefits:
AQG is the technique for generating the right set of questions from structured or unstructured information sources. It is a very important and challenging problem in NLP and an on-going research trend.
NLP researches which started with creating factoid questions is now targeting Higher Order Thinking(HOT) questions with the help of advanced Deep Learning techniques and Transformers.
The potential benefits from an AQG system are huge. It can assist teachers in the laborious task of creating questions manually, thus saving time and resources. It can help promote student learning by random generation of questions. It also works as an effective tool for aiding adaptive engines and faster evaluation of student performance.
AQG reduces the cost of question construction in terms of both money and effort which, in turn, enables educators to spend more time on other important instructional activities. In addition to resource-saving, having a large number of good-quality questions also enables the enrichment of the teaching process with more and more practice exercises. Finally, being able to automatically control question characteristics, such as question difficulty and cognitive level, can facilitate the construction of good quality tests with particular requirements. In Summary, AQG Systems are fast, streamlined, non-repetitive, randomized, and secure systems.
A Smart Question Generator by Impelsys
Intelligent Questionnaire (iQ), an Impelsys Innovation Lab solution, is a cloud-based API that aims to generate meaningful, syntactically accurate, and natural text-based questions and answers from certain sub-spans of the data.
Driven by AI-NLP-based algorithms, iQ generates contextual and diverse questions from the natural text by reading the article/book/journal and prompts the author/editor to submit a pool of questions along with their corresponding answers.
The Architecture of iQ includes a state–of–the–art neural encoder-decoder model with an attention mechanism that produces substantive and diverse questions from natural language phrases. Trained on the gold standard dataset (Squad), the encoder reads the input text to produce an answer-aware input representation, which is fed to the decoder to generate a specific query.
iQ has been built with a special focus on the medical domain along with the general domain and has been trained with industry-standard taxonomies like UML and MESH.
It supports multiple question types like Multiple Choice Questions, Fill in the Blanks, and “Wh” Questions and provides flexibility to users to modify, erase and download the questions at their convenience. It also can show the source text or remediation location of the question being generated.
iQ Working Mechanism
Example:
Input: A myocardial infarction (MI), also known as a _________, that occurs when blood flow decreases or stops to a part of the heart, causing damage to the heart muscle.
Answer: Heart attack
Our in-house experts have validated the performance of iQ and also compared it with the other solutions available in the market. We aim to provide a seamless user experience and quality output and soon, our target is to add a couple of enhancements such as multiple domain support, better distractors, Boolean and HOT questions, and case studies.
iQ helps to reduce the cost of question construction in terms of both money and effort which, in turn, enables educators to spend more time on other important instructional activities. In addition to resource-saving, having a large number of good-quality questions prepared by iQ, it also enables the enrichment of the teaching process with more and more practice exercises.
In summary, iQ is a fast, streamlined, non-repetitive, randomized, and secure AQG system.
For an exclusive sneak peek of the iQ, Schedule a demo today!
