Controlling Cloze-test Question Item Difficulty with PLM-based Surrogate Models for IRT Assessment
<|reference_start|>Controlling Cloze-test Question Item Difficulty with PLM-based Surrogate Models for IRT Assessment: Item difficulty plays a crucial role in adaptive testing. However, few works have focused on generating questions of varying difficulty levels, especially for multiple-choice (MC) cloze tests. We propose training pre-trained language models (PLMs) as surrogate models to enable item response theory (IRT) assessment, avoiding the need for human test subjects. We also propose two strategies to control the difficulty levels of both the gaps and the distractors using ranking rules to reduce invalid distractors. Experimentation on a benchmark dataset demonstrates that our proposed framework and methods can effectively control and evaluate the difficulty levels of MC cloze tests.<|reference_end|>
@article{zhang2024controlling,
    title={Controlling Cloze-test Question Item Difficulty with PLM-based Surrogate
  Models for IRT Assessment},
    author={Jingshen Zhang and Jiajun Xie and Xinying Qiu},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.01456},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.01456},
    primaryClass={cs.CL cs.AI cs.CY}
}