Cited by 514Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Adaptive LearningArtificial Intelligence in EducationEducational Technology and Assessment

A Systematic Review of Automatic Question Generation for Educational Purposes

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Kurdi, Ghader, Leo, Jared, Parsia, Bijan, Sattler, Uli, Al-Emari, Salam·2020·International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education

Abstract

While exam-style questions are a fundamental educational tool serving a variety of purposes, manual construction of questions is a complex process that requires training, experience, and resources. This, in turn, hinders and slows down the use of educational activities (e.g. providing practice questions) and new advances (e.g. adaptive testing) that require a large pool of questions. To reduce the expenses associated with manual construction of questions and to satisfy the need for a continuous supply of new questions, automatic question generation (AQG) techniques were introduced. This review extends a previous review on AQG literature that has been published up to late 2014. It includes 93 papers that were between 2015 and early 2019 and tackle the automatic generation of questions for educational purposes. The aims of this review are to: provide an overview of the AQG community and its activities, summarise the current trends and advances in AQG, highlight the changes that the area has undergone in the recent years, and suggest areas for improvement and future opportunities for AQG. Similar to what was found previously, there is little focus in the current literature on generating questions of controlled difficulty, enriching question forms and structures, automating template construction, improving presentation, and generating feedback. Our findings also suggest the need to further improve experimental reporting, harmonise evaluation metrics, and investigate other evaluation methods that are more feasible.

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  • Prior systematic reviews have focused on investigating issues related to one specific application scenario of LLMs-based innovations.

    “Prior systematic reviews have focused on investigating these issues related to one specific application scenario of LLMsbased innovations (eg, question generation, essay scoring, chatbots or automated feedback) (Cavalcanti et al., 2021;Kurdi et al., 2020;Ramesh & Sanampudi, 2022;Wollny et al., 2021).”

    From Practical and ethical challenges of large language models in education: A systematic scoping review (2024) · cites this paper as Kurdi et al., 2020

    The Introduction and Conclusion and Future Work identify this as a systematic review focused on automatic question generation for educational purposes, supporting its use as an example of a review of one application. The cited passages do not establish that the review concerns LLM-based innovations; that characterization is unsupported by this source. (LLM, conf=0.86)

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  • A few specific reviews exist for particular domain areas of question generation.

    “There are a few specific reviews, in particular domain areas of question generation. For example, the work done for question generation in the educational domain is discussed in [15].”
  • Some existing AI tools for item generation are costly, need high technical support, and have good results.

    “Some of these are costly, need high technical support, and have good results [24–27].”

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Research works printed but not linked: 15

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  5. Faizan, A., Lohmann, S., Modi, V. (2017). Multiple choice question generation for slides. In: Computer Science Conference for University of Bonn Students, pp. 1-6.
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  8. Kaur, A., & Singh, S. (2017). Automatic question generation system for Punjabi. In: The international conference on recent innovations in science, Agriculture, Engineering and Management.
  9. Kaur, J., & Bathla, A. K. (2015). A review on automatic question generation system from a given Hindi text. International Journal of Research in Computer Applications and Robotics (IJRCAR), 3(6), 87-92.
  10. Kurdi, G., Leo, J., Matentzoglu, N., Parsia, B., Forege, S., Donato, G., Dowling, W. (2019). A comparative study of methods for a priori prediction of MCQ difficulty. the Semantic Web journal, In press.
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  14. Vinu, E.V., & Kumar, P.S. (2015a). Improving large-scale assessment tests by ontology based approach. In: the 28th international florida artificial intelligence research society conference, pp. 457- 462.
  15. Wang, Z., Lan, A.S., Nie, W., Waters, A.E., Grimaldi, P.J., Baraniuk, R.G. (2018). QG-net: a data-driven question generation model for educational content. In: the 5th Annual ACM Conference on Learning at Scale, pp. 15-25.

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Authors
Kurdi, G., Leo, J., Parsia, B., Sattler, U., & Al-Emari, S.
Affiliations
University of Manchester (GB)
Corresponding author
Kurdi, Ghader
Venue
International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Published
2020-03
Volume
30
Issue
1
Pages
121-204
ISSN
1560-4292 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W2989613245
Cited by
514
References
159
Citations by year
2026: 96 · 2025: 111 · 2024: 105 · 2023: 89 · 2022: 53 · 2021: 42 · 2020: 18
FWCI
1.83
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • Research Explorer (The University of Manchester) (publishedVersion, other-oa)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Adaptive Learning
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Artificial Intelligence in Education
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Educational Technology and Assessment
Keywords
automatic question generation, adaptive testing, question templates, automated feedback, evaluation metrics, practice questions, educational technology

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