Carrier Sentence Selection for Fill-in-the-blank Items

Fill-in-the-blank items are a common form of exercise in computer-assisted language learning systems. To automatically generate an effective item, the system must be able to select a high-quality carrier sentence that illustrates the usage of the target word. Previous approaches for carrier sentence selection have considered sentence length, vocabulary difficulty, the position of the target word and the presence of finite verbs. This paper investigates the utility of word co-occurrence statistics and lexical similarity as selection criteria. In an evaluation on generating fill-in-the-blank items for learning Chinese as a foreign language, we show that these two criteria can improve carrier sentence quality.