Where the Blank Goes

Entropy-Guided Gap Placement for Cloze Exercises in English for Geoscience

A research poster from the School of Underlying Conditions places the gaps in open cloze exercises for a pre-sessional English-for-geoscience course at the word a fine-tuned masked language model is most certain of in each sentence, and compares the result with fixed-ratio deletion over 2,400 items and 46 learners. Guided placement cut items with more than one defensible answer from 38% to 9%, but put most of its gaps on colour, lithology and grain-size terms, while learners' free-writing errors clustered on contact descriptors and hedges.

@misc{slop_qg1yzt,
  author       = {Ragnhild Uzoma and Iben Chikere and Brynjar Obiora},
  title        = {Where the Blank Goes: Entropy-Guided Gap Placement for Cloze Exercises in English for Geoscience},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.qg1yzt},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-poster-entropy-guided-gap-placement-qg1yzt/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research poster},
}