학술논문

Taming the Firehose: Unsupervised Machine Learning for Syntactic Partitioning of Large Volumes of Automatically Generated Items to Assist Automated Test Assembly
Document Type
Journal Articles
Reports - Evaluative
Source
Journal of Applied Testing Technology. 2020 21(1):1-11.
Subject
Artificial Intelligence
Automation
Test Construction
Test Items
Syntax
Item Banks
Natural Language Processing
Language
English
ISSN
2375-5636
Abstract
Automatic item generation can rapidly generate large volumes of exam items, but this creates challenges for assembly of exams which aim to include syntactically diverse items. First, we demonstrate a diminishing marginal syntactic return for automatic item generation using a saturation detection approach. This analysis can help users of automatic item generation to generate more diverse item banks. We then develop a pipeline that uses an unsupervised machine learning method for partitioning of a large, automatically generated item bank into syntactically distinct clusters. We explore applications to test assembly and conclude that machine learning methods can provide utility in harnessing the large datasets achievable by automatic item generation.