Improving the Production Efficiency and Well-formedness of Automatically-Generated Multiple-Choice Cloze Vocabulary Questions

Multiple-choice cloze (fill-in-the-blank) questions are widely used in knowledge testing and are commonly used for testing vocabulary knowledge. Word Quiz Constructor (WQC) is a Java application that is designed to produce such test items automatically from the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000) and using various online and offline resources. The present work evaluates recently added features of WQC to see whether they improve the production quality and well-formedness of vocabulary quiz items over previously implemented features in WQC. Results of a production test and a well-formedness survey using Amazon Mechanical Turk show that newly-introduced features (Linsear Write readability formula and Google Books NGrams frequency list) significantly improve the production quality of items over previous features (Automated Readability Index and frequency list derived from the British Academic Written English corpus). Items are produced faster and stem sentences are shorter in length without any degradation in their well-formedness. Approximately 90{\%} of such items are judged well-formed, surpassing the rate of manually-produced items.