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SCDE: Sentence Cloze Dataset with High Quality Distractors From Examinations

Xiang Kong, Varun Gangal, Eduard H. Hovy

Abstract

We introduce SCDE, a dataset to evaluate the performance of computational models through sentence prediction. SCDE is a humancreated sentence cloze dataset, collected from public school English examinations. Our task requires a model to fill up multiple blanks in a passage from a shared candidate set with distractors designed by English teachers. Experimental results demonstrate that this task requires the use of non-local, discourse-level context beyond the immediate sentence neighborhood. The blanks require joint solving and significantly impair each other's context. Furthermore, through ablations, we show that the distractors are of high quality and make the task more challenging. Our experiments show that there is a significant performance gap between advanced models (72%) and humans (87%), encouraging future models to bridge this gap. 1 2

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Cited by top-tier papers2

  1. Distractor Generation in Multiple-Choice Tasks: A Survey of Methods, Datasets, and EvaluationElaf Alhazmi, Quan Sheng, Wei Emma Zhang, Munazza Zaib et al.EMNLP 2024 · 15 citations
  2. SCOP: Evaluating the Comprehension Process of Large Language Models from a Cognitive ViewYongjie Xiao, Hongru Liang, Peixin Qin, Yao Zhang et al.ACL 2025 · 1 citation

Builds on1

  1. Abductive Commonsense ReasoningChandra Bhagavatula, Ronan Le Bras, Chaitanya Malaviya, Keisuke Sakaguchi et al.ICLR 2020 · 521 citations

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