Detmar Meurers, Ramon Ziai, Niels Ott, and Janina Kopp
Proceedings of the TextInfer 2011 Workshop on Textual Entailment.
Reading comprehension activities are an authentic task including a rich, language-based context, which makes them an interesting real-life challenge for research into automatic content analysis. For textual entailment research, content assessment of reading comprehension exercises provides an interesting opportunity for extrinsic, real-purpose evaluation, which also supports the integration of context and task information into the analysis.
In this paper, we discuss the first results for content assessment of reading comprehension activities for German and present results which are competitive with the current state of the art for English. Diving deeper into the results, we provide an analysis in terms of the different question types and the ways in which the information asked for is encoded in the text.
We then turn to analyzing the role of the question and argue that the surface-based account of information that is given in the question should be replaced with a more sophisticated, linguistically informed analysis of the informa- tion structuring of the answer in the context of the question that it is a response to.
Electronically available:
Note: The electronic versions of the publications linked on this page are the last versions I had the copyright for. Where a publisher copyedited and/or typeset the papers, the electronic copies linked here are NOT identical to the officially published version, which should be used for any quotes, references to page numbers, etc.
Bibtex entry:
@InProceedings{meurers-EtAl:2011:TextInfer,
author = {Meurers, Detmar and Ziai, Ramon and Ott, Niels
and Kopp, Janina},
title = {Evaluating Answers to Reading Comprehension Questions
in Context: Results for German and the
Role of Information Structure},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the TextInfer 2011 Workshop on
Textual Entailment},
year = {2011},
address = {Edinburgh, Scottland, UK},
publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
pages = {1--9},
url = {http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W11-2401}
}