面向英语阅读测试的采用摘要和句法技术的首个提问生成方法

First Question Generation Method via Summarization and Syntax for English Reading Tests

摘要: 在中小学英语教学中，阅读理解测试的首个提问是至关重要的，以其作为考察切入点能够引导后续问题的提出，以便检验学生理解能力和逻辑思维能力。现有的提问生成方法产生的问句内容发散，难以达到教学考察目的，并且严重依赖基础知识库和计算资源。为此，提出采用摘要和句法技术，以低算力高效率的方式实现首个提问生成。该方法从英语阅读正文中，选择核心摘要句以便聚焦正文主旨，并通过转译规则改写摘要语句的表述方式。对于转译后的核心摘要句，分析其主谓宾成分信息，确定关注对象，匹配相应的疑问词，进而根据语法规则生成首个提问。实验表明，提出的方法的语义相似度Bert Score和精确率BLRU-4分别达到了67.15和16.07，在句法、语义和可回答性方面均优于基线方法，能够有效生成适配于英语教学场景的首次提问。

Abstract: In basic English teaching, the first question in reading tests is crucial, which acts as an examination entry point leading to subsequent questions and testing students’ comprehension and logical thinking skills. Existing methods generate questions that are divergent in content, hardly meaningful for pedagogical investigation, and heavily dependent on knowledge base and computational resources. Therefore, this paper proposed a method using summarization and syntax to achieve first question generation in a low-computing and high-efficient manner. The method selected key summary sentence from the English reading text to focus on the main idea of the text, and changed its presentation by applying translation rules. For the paraphrased key summary sentence, its subject-predicate-object components was analyzed to determine the subject of concern, matched the corresponding question words, and then generated the first question according to the grammatical rules. Experimental results show that the semantic similarity Bert Score and accuracy BLRU-4 of proposed method reach 67.15 and 16.07, respectively, which outperforms the baseline method in terms of syntax, semantics, and answerability. Experiments also demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively generate first questions adapted to English teaching scenarios.