Difficulty-Controllable Cloze Question Distractor Generation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kang, Seokhoon, Jeon, Yejin, Hwang, Seonjeong, Lee, Gary Geunbae
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kang, Seokhoon
Jeon, Yejin
Hwang, Seonjeong
Lee, Gary Geunbae
author_facet Kang, Seokhoon
Jeon, Yejin
Hwang, Seonjeong
Lee, Gary Geunbae
contents Multiple-choice cloze questions are commonly used to assess linguistic proficiency and comprehension. However, generating high-quality distractors remains challenging, as existing methods often lack adaptability and control over difficulty levels, and the absence of difficulty-annotated datasets further hinders progress. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for generating distractors with controllable difficulty by leveraging both data augmentation and a multitask learning strategy. First, to create a high-quality, difficulty-annotated dataset, we introduce a two-way distractor generation process to produce diverse and plausible distractors. These candidates are filtered and then categorized by difficulty using an ensemble QA system. Second, this newly created dataset is used to train a difficulty-controllable generation model via multitask learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our method generates high-quality distractors across difficulty levels and substantially outperforms GPT-4o in aligning distractor difficulty with human perception.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_01526
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Difficulty-Controllable Cloze Question Distractor Generation
Kang, Seokhoon
Jeon, Yejin
Hwang, Seonjeong
Lee, Gary Geunbae
Computation and Language
Multiple-choice cloze questions are commonly used to assess linguistic proficiency and comprehension. However, generating high-quality distractors remains challenging, as existing methods often lack adaptability and control over difficulty levels, and the absence of difficulty-annotated datasets further hinders progress. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for generating distractors with controllable difficulty by leveraging both data augmentation and a multitask learning strategy. First, to create a high-quality, difficulty-annotated dataset, we introduce a two-way distractor generation process to produce diverse and plausible distractors. These candidates are filtered and then categorized by difficulty using an ensemble QA system. Second, this newly created dataset is used to train a difficulty-controllable generation model via multitask learning. Experimental results demonstrate that our method generates high-quality distractors across difficulty levels and substantially outperforms GPT-4o in aligning distractor difficulty with human perception.
title Difficulty-Controllable Cloze Question Distractor Generation
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01526