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Making Machines Curious!

Blake Bradford Avatar

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Have you ever wondered how machines can generate questions from text? In this article, we will delve into the fascinating world of automated question generation and explore a project that uses natural language processing techniques to accomplish this task.

The question generator project employs a clever strategy that involves several key components: sentence selection, gap selection, question formation, and question classification. Let’s walk through each of these components to understand how the project generates questions.

First and foremost, the project starts by selecting topically important sentences from the text document. This crucial step ensures that the generated questions are relevant and focused on the main topics of the text.

Next, the project uses the Stanford Parser to extract noun phrases (NP) and adjective phrases (ADJP) from the important sentences as candidate gaps. These gaps will later be filled with the appropriate words to form the questions.

Once the gaps are identified, the project utilizes the NLTK parser and grammar syntax logics to generate actual questions from the fill-in-the-blank type question template. This ensures that the generated questions are grammatically correct and well-structured.

Finally, the project classifies the quality of the generated questions using a pre-trained SVM classifier. This classifier is specifically trained for blank-type questions, adding an extra layer of sophistication to the question generation process.

Now that we understand the strategy behind the question generator project, let’s dive into the build process and get ready to generate some questions of our own!

To build the project, we need to follow a few simple steps. Start by cloning the project repository and navigating to the project directory. Then, install the required dependencies by running the command pip install -r requirements.txt. If you encounter any issues with the dotenv package, try uninstalling dotenv and installing python-dotenv instead.

Next, we need to set up the Stanford Parser and Named Entity Recognition (NER). Create a folder to host all the Stanford models and download the necessary files from the Stanford NLP website. Move the files to the appropriate locations, as described in the project’s README.

After setting up the Stanford Parser and NER, it’s time to configure the environment variables. Create an environment variable file named .env in the project root directory. Within this file, you can set the SENTENCE_RATIO variable to control the ratio of sentences selected from the given text. Additionally, there are a few other important variables that you can adjust, such as the maximum number of entities allowed in a sentence.

With the build process complete and the environment variables configured, you are now ready to generate questions with the question generator project. Let your curiosity run wild and discover the exciting possibilities of automated question generation!

In conclusion, the question generator project provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of automated question generation. By employing smart strategies and leveraging natural language processing techniques, machines can now generate questions from text like never before. Whether you are a software engineer, a linguistics enthusiast, or simply curious about the capabilities of artificial intelligence, this project offers an exciting opportunity to explore the realm of automated question generation.

If you have any questions or want to learn more about the project, don’t hesitate to reach out. Happy questioning!

References:
Question Generator GitHub Repository
Intel Software Article on Smart Question Generation
DynamicHub Blog on Automatic Question Generation

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