Evaluation of automatically generated pronoun reference questions

Abstract

This study provides a detailed analysis of evaluation of English pronoun reference questions which are created automatically by machine. Pronoun reference questions are multiple choice questions that ask test takers to choose an antecedent of a target pronoun in a reading passage from four options. The evaluation was performed from two perspectives: The perspective of English teachers and that of English learners. Item analysis suggests that machinegenerated questions achieve comparable quality with human-made questions. Correlation analysis revealed a strong correlation between the scores of machinegenerated questions and that of humanmade questions.