Language Model Adaptation with Applications in AI for Education
by Semere Kiros Bitew
The overall theme of my dissertation is in adapting language models mainly for applications in AI in education to automatically create educational content. It addresses the challenges in formulating test and exercise questions in educational settings, which traditionally require significant training, experience, time, and resources. This is particularly critical in high-stakes environments like certifications and tests, where questions cannot be reused. In particular, the primary research is focused on two educational tasks: distractor generation and gap-filling exercise generation. Distractor generation task refers to generating plausible but incorrect answers in multiple-choice questions, while gap-filling exercise generation refers to inducing well-chosen gaps to generate grammar exercises from existing texts. These tasks, although extensively researched, present unexplored avenues that recent advancements in language models can address. As a secondary objective, I explore the adaptation of coreference resolution to new languages. Coreference resolution is a key NLP task that involves clustering mentions in a text that refer to the same real-world entities, a process vital for understanding and generating coherent language.