Abduction and consequence generation in a support system for the design of logical multiple-choice questions

This paper presents Logitest, a system that can be used to assist the designer of multiple-choice questions aiming at verifying logical reasoning abilities (provided they can be represented in propositional logic). Beyond allowing the designer to check the status of an option with respect to the item stem (the problem presentation), i.e. whether it is derivable or consistent with the given information, the system can accomplish generative tasks (abduction and consequence generation) that can be useful both to complete the item stem, and to generate plausible distractors (incorrect options). The provably correct and complete algorithm used to perform abduction and consequence generation finds out minimal solutions with no need to compare each of them with all the others.