Automatic Question Generation System for English Reading Comprehension
This paper presents a web based automatic question generation (AQG) system to generate reading comprehension questions and multiple choice (MC) questions on grammar from a given English text. Such system saves teachers' time on setting questions and facilitates students and their parents to prepare self learning exercises. Our web based system can automatically generate Wh questions (i.e. what, who, when, where, why, and how) and MC grammar questions of selected sentences. Wh questions can also be generated from user specified answer phrases. The generation of Wh questions exploits the pre trained natural language understanding model, Text To Text Transfer Transformer (T5) and an adapted version of the SQuAD 2.0 machine reading comprehension dataset. The generation of MC questions involves identifying regular verbs in a text and using the verb's lexemes as the answer choices. Our system takes an average time of about 1 s to generate a Wh question and it generates a MC question almost instantly. User evaluation indicated that our system is easy to use and satisfactory in usefulness, usability, and quality, revealing the effectiveness of our system for teachers and parents.