Assessing Question Quality Using NLP

An NLP algorithm was developed to assess question quality to inform feedback on questions generated by students within iSTART (an intelligent tutoring system that teaches reading strategies). A corpus of 4575 questions was coded using a four-level taxonomy. NLP indices were calculated for each question and machine learning was used to predict question quality. NLP indices related to lexical sophistication modestly predicted question type. Accuracies improved when predicting two levels (shallow versus deep). [This paper was published in: E. Andre, R. Baker, X. Hu, M. M. T. Rodrigo, & B. du Boulay (Eds.), "Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education" (pp. 523-527). Wuhan, China: Springer.]