Exercise Maker: Automatic Language Exercise Generation

P. 441–452.

Malafeev A.

Current trends in education, namely blended learning and computer-assisted language learning, underlie the growing interest to the task of automatically generating language exercises. Such automatic systems are especially in demand given the variability in language learning. Despite the abundance of resources for language learning, there is often a lack of specific exercises targeting a particular group of learners or ESP course. This paper gives an overview of a computer system called Exercise Maker that is aimed at flexible and versatile language exercise generation. The system supports seven exercise types, which can be generated from arbitrary passages written in English. Being able to tailor educational material to learners’ interests is known to boost motivation in learners (Heilman et al., 2010). An important feature of the system is the automatic ranking of the source passages according to their complexity/readability. As shown by expert evaluation, the automatically generated exercises are of high quality: the gap precision is about 97-98%, while the overall exercise acceptance rate varies from 90% to 97.5%. Exercise Maker is freely available for educational and research purposes.

Keywords: лексико-грамматические упражнения, natural language processing, автоматическая обработка текста, Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), lexico-grammatical exercises, computer-assisted language learning, English as a foreign language, language exercise generation, английский язык как иностранный, text readability, автоматическое создание языковых упражнений, обучение иностранному языку с помощью компьютера, анализ сложности текста

In book

Computational Linguistics and Intellectual Technologies. Papers from the Annual International Conference “Dialogue” (2015)

Issue 14(21). , M.: Russian State University for the Humanitie, 2015.