Automatic Question Generation for Scaffolding Self-explanations for Code Comprehension

Abstract

This work presents two systems, Machine Noun Question Generation (QG) and Machine Verb QG, developed to generate short questions and gap-fill questions, which Intelligent Tutoring Systems then use to guide students’ self-explanations during code comprehension. We evaluate our system by comparing the quality of questions generated by the system against human expert-generated questions. Our result shows that these systems performed similarly to humans in most criteria. Among the machines, we find that Machine Noun QG performed better.