AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS FROM DOMAIN ONTOLOGIES

ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to present an innovative approach for generating multiple choice questions in automatic way. Although other approaches have been already reported in the literature, the approach presented in this paper is based on domain specific ontologies and it is independent of lexicons such as WordNet or other linguistic resources. The paper also reports on a first prototype implementation of such an approach which creates multiple choice question items using the Semantic Web standard technology OWL (Ontology Web Language). The proposed approach is independent of the domain since questions are generated according to specific ontology-based strategies. In current implementation, simple natural language generation techniques are used in order to provide the items in the questionnaires. KEYWORDS Ontologies, multiple choice questions, assessment 1. INTRODUCTION Multiple choice questions (MCQ) are a very popular means of assessment and self-assessment in both traditional and electronic learning settings. They are appealing to the examinees, they can be automatically graded and they provide the capability of frequent testing, almost immediate feedback on the performance. An MCQ questionnaire comprises a number of questions named