Learning to Rank Definitions to Generate Quizzes for Interactive Information Presentation

This paper proposes the idea of ranking definitions of a person (a set of biographical facts) to automatically generate “Who is this?” quizzes. The definitions are ordered according to how difficult they make it to name the person. Such ranking would enable users to interactively learn about a person through dialogue with a system with improved understanding and lasting motivation, which is useful for educational systems. In our approach, we train a ranker that learns from data the appropriate ranking of definitions based on features that encode the importance of keywords in a definition as well as its content. Experimental results show that our approach is significantly better in ranking definitions than baselines that use conventional information retrieval measures such as tf*idf and pointwisemutual informa-