@inproceedings{sauberli-clematide-2024-automatic,
    title = "Automatic Generation and Evaluation of Reading Comprehension Test Items with Large Language Models",
    author = {S{\"a}uberli, Andreas  and
      Clematide, Simon},
    editor = "Wilkens, Rodrigo  and
      Cardon, R{\'e}mi  and
      Todirascu, Amalia  and
      Gala, N{\'u}ria",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Tools and Resources for People with REAding DIfficulties (READI) @ LREC-COLING 2024",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.readi-1.3",
    pages = "22--37",
    abstract = "Reading comprehension tests are used in a variety of applications, reaching from education to assessing the comprehensibility of simplified texts. However, creating such tests manually and ensuring their quality is difficult and time-consuming. In this paper, we explore how large language models (LLMs) can be used to generate and evaluate multiple-choice reading comprehension items. To this end, we compiled a dataset of German reading comprehension items and developed a new protocol for human and automatic evaluation, including a metric we call text informativity, which is based on guessability and answerability. We then used this protocol and the dataset to evaluate the quality of items generated by Llama 2 and GPT-4. Our results suggest that both models are capable of generating items of acceptable quality in a zero-shot setting, but GPT-4 clearly outperforms Llama 2. We also show that LLMs can be used for automatic evaluation by eliciting item reponses from them. In this scenario, evaluation results with GPT-4 were the most similar to human annotators. Overall, zero-shot generation with LLMs is a promising approach for generating and evaluating reading comprehension test items, in particular for languages without large amounts of available data.",
}

Reading comprehension tests are used in a variety of applications, reaching from education to assessing the comprehensibility of simplified texts. However, creating such tests manually and ensuring their quality is difficult and time-consuming. In this paper, we explore how large language models (LLMs) can be used to generate and evaluate multiple-choice reading comprehension items. To this end, we compiled a dataset of German reading comprehension items and developed a new protocol for human and automatic evaluation, including a metric we call text informativity, which is based on guessability and answerability. We then used this protocol and the dataset to evaluate the quality of items generated by Llama 2 and GPT-4. Our results suggest that both models are capable of generating items of acceptable quality in a zero-shot setting, but GPT-4 clearly outperforms Llama 2. We also show that LLMs can be used for automatic evaluation by eliciting item reponses from them. In this scenario, evaluation results with GPT-4 were the most similar to human annotators. Overall, zero-shot generation with LLMs is a promising approach for generating and evaluating reading comprehension test items, in particular for languages without large amounts of available data.
S{\"a}uberli, Andreas Clematide, Simon
Automatic Generation and Evaluation of Reading Comprehension Test Items with Large Language Models