Computer Assisted Creation of Items for Scrambled Sentence Tests

We apply techniques of natural language processing to support the creation of special scrambled sentences that allow only specific word orders. The scrambled sentences are useful for students to practice their knowledge about grammars. It takes two steps to create a test item for scrambled-sentence tests. We create a set of grammatical alternative sentences from the target sentence, and make sure that students will rebuild the target sentence by pegging some of the words in the target sentence. The proposed methods can automatically and effectively peg words to single out a specific sentence from a set of sentences. We also employ the Stanford parser and propose a practical heuristic principle to help teachers exclude a potentially large number of alternative grammatical orderings of a set of words in the scrambled sentence.