Question Generation for Generating Textbook Flashcards

Abstract

One of the most effective ways of retaining the meaning of important concepts in learning materials is to review them in spaced intervals. Millions of students around the world are trying to do exactly that with the help of flash cards. In this short paper, we present a new, transformer-based application for education that automates the process of creating flash cards by automatically generating questions and answers for textbooks. As a proof-of-concept, we report two studies: a) generating questions for textbook summaries written by humans and b) testing a fully-automated pipeline. Several aspects of the quality of the resulting question-answer pairs are evaluated by three annotators. Finally, we describe and make available for review the deployed prototype for the flash card application.

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Reproductions