Bundled Gap Filling: A New Paradigm for Unambiguous Cloze Exercises

Cloze tests, also known as gap-fill exercises, are a popular tool for acquiring and evaluating language proficiency. A major challenge in the way of automating scoring of cloze tests is the yet unsolved problem of gap filler ambiguity. To address this challenge, we present the concept of bundled gap filling, along with (1) an efficient computational model for automatically generating unambiguous gap bundle exercises, and (2) a disambiguation measure for guiding the construction of the exercises and validating their level of ambiguity. Our evaluation shows that our proposed exercises achieve a dramatic reduction in gap filler ambiguity, while our disambiguation measure can be effectively used to discard exercises that are nevertheless too ambiguous.