Response-free item difficulty modelling for multiple-choice items with fine-tuned transformers: Component-wise representation and multi-task learning
Item difficulty must often be estimated before test administration, when no responses are yet available for calibration. While most response-free difficulty modelling approaches derive item-text features by hand for a separate statistical model, we fine-tune a transformer end-to-end on the wording, avoiding the theory-based feature design and the preprocessing that discards information. We address reading-comprehension multiple-choice items, whose difficulty depends on inferential demands spanning passage, question, and options, yet the simplest model sees one undifferentiated sequence and is trained on difficulty alone. We introduce and investigate two extensions to the joint-encoding ba...
| Authors | Jan Netík, Patrícia Martinková |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 16 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 September 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.