Automatic generation of text-based open cloze exercises

Abstract

This article presents an approach to the automatic generation of open cloze exercises that are based on real-life English texts. The exercise format is similar to the open cloze test used in Cambridge certificate exams (FCE, CAE, CPE). Two experiments were conducted to evaluate the usefulness on the machine-generated exercises and compare them with authentic Cambridge tests. The experiments showed that the generation method used was quite effective. With some customization, the presented method can be applied to generating similar exercises based on texts written in other languages.