Seeking Specialized Software
May 5, 2013 6:42 PM Subscribe
What's the best way to have a document turned into a fill-in-the-blanks quiz? In other words, I'm looking for a program that will remove key words from a document for the purpose of memorization. Ideally, it would avoid filler words like "and," "of," or "for," etc.
Are you looking for something interactive on the computer?
There are flash card programs that you can use to do this.
Anki is one, but there are others. You can create any kind of prompt and answer pair that you want. You can use multimedia elements, such as images, depending on the program.
Many flash card programs are built around the concept of spaced repetition, a method of deciding how frequently you need to see a given card. This is supposedly a very efficient and effective way to memorize things.
The "decks" of flash cards you create can be easily shared and viewed on pretty much any desktop or mobile device, if you are trying to put this together for a class or your kids or whatever.
posted by jsturgill at 8:31 AM on May 6, 2013 [1 favorite]
There are flash card programs that you can use to do this.
Anki is one, but there are others. You can create any kind of prompt and answer pair that you want. You can use multimedia elements, such as images, depending on the program.
Many flash card programs are built around the concept of spaced repetition, a method of deciding how frequently you need to see a given card. This is supposedly a very efficient and effective way to memorize things.
The "decks" of flash cards you create can be easily shared and viewed on pretty much any desktop or mobile device, if you are trying to put this together for a class or your kids or whatever.
posted by jsturgill at 8:31 AM on May 6, 2013 [1 favorite]
A technical term for what you want is a cloze passage or cloze exercise. This page has several different ways of generating them. The first way just removes every Nth word, so it could easily remove filler words as well. The second way is a little more interesting because it removes words on the basis of their frequency (in English, or at least in the particular English corpus, collection of many examples of English texts, you ask it to use). You can play with the settings a bit so it doesn't remove the most common words (which would probably include your filler words). When the options say 1k content, for example, it means the 1000 most common words. AWL refers to the Academic Word List. I tend to just play around with the settings until I start getting the kind of cloze I'm looking for.
On the same site there is a key words extractor. This lists the words that are much more frequent in your submitted text than in the larger corpus that it uses for comparison. This might be a way for you to identify some of the key words you might otherwise have missed.
If you already know which words you want to remove for the cloze, this page has a pretty easy interface.
posted by Sing Fool Sing at 6:05 PM on May 6, 2013
On the same site there is a key words extractor. This lists the words that are much more frequent in your submitted text than in the larger corpus that it uses for comparison. This might be a way for you to identify some of the key words you might otherwise have missed.
If you already know which words you want to remove for the cloze, this page has a pretty easy interface.
posted by Sing Fool Sing at 6:05 PM on May 6, 2013
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posted by These Birds of a Feather at 6:55 PM on May 5, 2013 [1 favorite]