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EMNLP Findings2022

CDGP: Automatic Cloze Distractor Generation based on Pre-trained Language Model

Shang-Hsuan Chiang, Ssu-Cheng Wang, Yao-Chung Fan

Abstract

Manually designing cloze test consumes enormous time and efforts.The major challenge lies in wrong option (distractor) selection.Having carefully-design distractors improves the effectiveness of learner ability assessment.As a result, the idea of automatically generating cloze distractor is motivated.In this paper, we investigate cloze distractor generation by exploring the employment of pre-trained language models (PLMs) as an alternative for candidate distractor generation.Experiments show that the PLM-enhanced model brings a substantial performance improvement.Our best performing model advances the state-of-theart result from 14.94 to 34.17 (NDCG@10 score).Our code and dataset is available at https://github.com/AndyChiangSH/CDGP.

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the full paper · 4 top-tier papers that cite it · related work

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Cited by top-tier papers4

  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. DiVERT: Distractor Generation with Variational Errors Represented as Text for Math Multiple-choice QuestionsNigel Fernandez, Alexander Scarlatos, Wanyong Feng, Simon Woodhead et al.EMNLP 2024 · 10 citations
  3. Generating Plausible Distractors for Multiple-Choice Questions via Student Choice PredictionYooseop Lee, Suin Kim, Yohan JoACL 2025
  4. Difficulty-Controllable Cloze Question Distractor GenerationSeokhoon Kang, Yejin Jeon, Seonjeong Hwang, Gary LeeACL 2026

Builds on2

  1. BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and ComprehensionMike Lewis, Yinhan Liu, Naman Goyal, Marjan Ghazvininejad et al.ACL 2020 · 1,224 citations
  2. Knowledge-Driven Distractor Generation for Cloze-Style Multiple Choice QuestionsSiyu Ren, Kenny Q. ZhuAAAI 2021 · 62 citations

Related papers

  1. DisGeM: Distractor Generation for Multiple Choice Questions with Span MaskingDevrim Çavusoglu, Seçil Sen, Ulas SertEMNLP Findings 2024 · 6 citations
  2. Distractor Generation based on Text2Text Language Models with Pseudo Kullback-Leibler Divergence RegulationHui-Juan Wang, Kai-Yu Hsieh, Han-Cheng Yu, Jui-Ching Tsou et al.ACL Findings 2023 · 9 citations
  3. Fine-Tuning Encoder-Decoder Models with Contrastive Learning for In-Context Distractor GenerationElaf Alhazmi, Quan Z. Sheng, Wei Emma Zhang, Mohammed I. Thanoon et al.EMNLP Findings 2025
  4. Enhancing Distractor Generation for Multiple-Choice Questions with Retrieval Augmented Pretraining and Knowledge Graph IntegrationHan-Cheng Yu, Yu-An Shih, Kin-Man Law, Kai-Yu Hsieh et al.ACL Findings 2024 · 18 citations
  5. A BERT-based Distractor Generation Scheme with Multi-tasking and Negative Answer Training StrategiesHo-Lam Chung, Ying-Hong Chan, Yao-Chung FanEMNLP Findings 2020 · 37 citations
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