Thesis (M.A.)--Indiana University, 2007. / Title from screen (viewed on June 11, 2007) Department of World Languages and Cultures, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-84)

Thesis (M.A.)--University of West Florida, 2007. / Title from title page of source document. Document formatted into pages; contains 42 pages. Includes bibliographical references.

Question generation (QG), which automatically generates good-quality questions from a piece of text, is capable of lowering the cost of the manual composition of questions. Recently Question generation has attracted increasing interest for its ability to supply a large number of questions for developing conversation systems and educational applications, as well as corpus development for natural language processing (NLP) research tasks, such as question answering and reading comprehension. Previous neural-based QG approaches have achieved remarkable performance. In contrast, these approaches require a large amount of data to train neural models properly, limiting the application of question generation in low-resource scenarios, e.g. with a few hundred training examples. This thesis aims to address the problem of the low-resource scenario by investigating a recently emerged paradigm of NLP modelling, prompt-based learning. Prompt-based learning, which makes predictions based on the knowledge of the pre-trained language model and some simple textual task descriptions, has shown great effectiveness in various NLP tasks in few-shot and zero-shot settings, in which a few or non-examples are needed to train a model. In this project, we have introduced a prompt-based question generation approach by constructing question generation task instructions that are understandable by a pre-trained sequence-to-sequence language model. Our experiment results show that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art question generation models with a vast margin of 36.8%, 204.8%, 455.9%, 1083.3%, 57.9% for metrics BLEU-1, BLEU-2, BLEU-3, BLEU-4, and ROUGE-L respectively in the few-shot learning settings. We also conducted a quality analysis of the generated questions and found that our approach can generate questions with correct grammar and relevant topical information when training with as few as 1,000 training examples.

In the current study, we explore and present different advantages creative writing can have on ESL and EFL-students’ writing and their attitude towards writing. We have also discovered some problems ESL or EFL-learners can come across in terms of writing in another language. In the syllabus for English in upper secondary school, it is stipulated that the students should be able to use their English in different situations. However, this is not always as easy as it might seem. Many ESL and EFL students claim that they feel anxious when it comes to writing in English, especially in an academic way, and do not feel confident enough with their own language production. This self-doubt is not unique for a specific country or region, it occurs all over the globe, and our Swedish students are certainly not an exception. Research shows that by practicing writing in a more creative and free way, the students can develop their language in a more relaxed setting, and at the same time increase their confidence and self-esteem regarding their language production.