# DisGeM: Distractor Generation for Multiple Choice Questions with Span Masking

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18263 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18263/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [ALBERT: A Lite BERT for Self-supervised Learning of Language Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11942/) (2019)
- [DeBERTa: Decoding-enhanced BERT with Disentangled Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03654/) (2020)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Automatic Distractor Generation for Multiple Choice Questions in Standard Tests](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13100/) (2020)
- [Knowledge-Driven Distractor Generation for Cloze-style Multiple Choice Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09853/) (2020)
- [A BERT-based Distractor Generation Scheme with Multi-tasking and Negative Answer Training Strategies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.05384/) (2020)
- [Better Distractions: Transformer-based Distractor Generation and Multiple Choice Question Filtering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09598/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Thinking in a Crowd: How Auxiliary Information Shapes LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18163/) (2025)
- [Mitigating Easy Option Bias in Multiple-Choice Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13428/) (2025)
- [Tailoring Diagnostic Modeling to Individual Learners: Personalized Distractor Generation via MCTS-Guided Reasoning Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.11184/) (2025)
- [The Ever-Evolving Science Exam](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.16514/) (2025)
- [Difficulty-Controllable Cloze Question Distractor Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01526/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have impacted numerous sub-fields such as natural language generation, natural language inference, question answering, and more. However, in the field of question generation, the creation of distractors for multiple-choice questions (MCQ) remains a challenging task. In this work, we present a simple, generic framework for distractor generation using readily available Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Unlike previous methods, our framework relies solely on pre-trained language models and does not require additional training on specific datasets. Building upon previous research, we introduce a two-stage framework consisting of candidate generation and candidate selection. Our proposed distractor generation framework outperforms previous methods without the need for training or fine-tuning. Human evaluations confirm that our approach produces more effective and engaging distractors. The related codebase is publicly available at https://github.com/obss/disgem.