Design and development of a question generator for learners of English

In this paper, we describe the design and development of the first release of an online question generator. This pedagogic tool enables learners of English to generate open-ended, closed-ended and tag questions for a target sentence. Learners input a sentence (i.e. declarative statement) and select the type or types of questions to generate. Question generation is a non-trivial task involving numerous processes including syntactic transformation and pronoun selection. Syntactic transformation was achieved through the use of rules based on parse trees while the selection of interrogative pronouns was achieved using matching potential question foci with a linguistic knowledge encoded condition set. Lessons learned are detailed to help other researchers avoid or attempt to ameliorate the pitfalls and problems encountered in this study.