Automated generation of assessment tests from domain ontologies

The objective of this paper is to investigate the scope of OWL-DL ontologies in generating multiple choice questions (MCQs) that can be employed for conducting large scale assessments, and to conduct a detailed study on the effectiveness of the generated assessment items, using principles in the Item Response Theory (IRT). The details of a prototype system called Automatic Test Generation (ATG) system and its extended version called Extended-ATG system are elaborated. The ATG system (the initial system) was useful in generating multiple choice question-sets of required sizes from a given formal ontology. It works by employing a set of heuristics for selecting only those questions which are required for conducting a domain related assessment. We enhance this system with new features such as finding the difficulty values of generated MCQs and controlling the overall difficulty-level of question-sets, to form Extended-ATG system (the new system). This paper discusses the novel methods adopted to address these new features. That is, a method to determine the difficulty-level of a question-stem and an algorithm to control the difficulty of a question-set. While the ATG system uses at most two predicates for generating the stems of MCQs, the E-ATG system has no such limitations and employs several interesting predicate based patterns for stem generation. These predicate patterns are obtained from a detailed empirical study of large real-world question-sets. In addition, the new system also incorporates a specific non-pattern based approach which makes use of aggregation-like operations, to generate questions that involve superlatives (e.g., highest mountain, largest river etc.). We studied the feasibility and usefulness of the proposed methods by generating MCQs from several ontologies available online. The effectiveness of the suggested question selection heuristics is studied by comparing the resulting questions with those questions which were prepared by domain experts. It is found that the difficulty-scores of questions computed by the proposed system are highly correlated with their actual difficulty-scores determined with the help of IRT applied to data from classroom experiments. Our results show that the E-ATG system can generate domain specific question-sets which are close to the human generated ones (in terms of their semantic similarity). Also, the system can be potentially used for controlling the overall difficulty-level of the automatically genera