Using Wikipedia and Conceptual Graph Structures to Generate Questions for Academic Writing Support

In this paper, we present a novel approach for semiautomatic question generation to support academic writing. Our system first extracts key phrases from students' literature review papers. Each key phrase is matched with a Wikipedia article and classified into one of five abstract concept categories: Research Field, Technology, System, Term, and Other. Using the content of the matched Wikipedia article, the system then constructs a conceptual graph structure representation for each key phrase and the questions are then generated based the structure. To evaluate the quality of the computer generated questions, we conducted a version of the Bystander Turing test, which involved 20 research students who had written literature reviews for an IT methods course. The pedagogical values of generated questions were evaluated using a semiautomated process. The results indicate that the students had difficulty distinguishing between computer-generated and supervisor-generated questions. Computer-generated questions were also rated as being as pedagogically useful as supervisor-generated questions, and more useful than generic questions. The findings also suggest that the computer-generated questions were more useful for the first-year students than for second or third-year students. (Contains 12 tables and 4 figures.)