Constructing human readable sentences based on a survey

Question

The following is a survey given to course attendees to assess an instructor at the end of the course.

Communication Skills
1. The instructor communicated course material clearly and accurately.
Yes No
2. The instructor explained course objectives and learning outcomes.
Yes No
3. In the event of not understanding course materials the instructor was available outside of class.
Yes No
4. Was instructor feedback and grading process clear and helpful?
Yes No
5. Do you feel that your oral and written skills have improved while in this course?
Yes No

We would like to summarize each attendees selection based on the choices chosen by him.

If the provided answers were [No, No, Yes, Yes, Yes]. Then we would summarize this as "The instructor was not able to summarize course objectives and learning outcomes clearly, but was available and usually helpful outside of class. The instructor feedback and grading process was clear and helpful and I feel that my oral and written skills have improved because of this course.

Based on the selections chosen by the attendee the summary would be quite different. This leads to many answers based on the choices selected and the number of such questions in the survey. The questions are usually provided by the training organization. How do you come up with a generic solution so that this can be effectively translated into a human readable form. I am looking for tools or libraries (java based), suggestions which will help me create such human readable output. I would like to hide the complexity from the end users as much as possible.

Answer 1

You could prepare a positive version and negative response sentence for each question. You could then connect these sentences using connecting words of supporting or contradicting nature (however, furthermore, in addition, despite this...) so that the response will be along the lines of

"the instructor communicated the course material clearly and accurately. Furthermore, the instructor explained course objectives and learning outcomes. However, In the event of not understanding course materials the instructor was not available outside of class."

and so on. All you have to do is check if the response to question n is the same as to question n-1 to decide which connecting word to use. HTH

Answer 2

Unfortunately, I don't think there is a generic solution to this problem. Not only is it hard/impossible to figure out which questions are related and how in order to group them and add words like "but," "and" and "however" where appropriate, but the wording that you are trying to generate isn't an obvious transformation. Take question 4: If the responder answered no, the resulting assertion would be "Either instructor feedback was not clear or not helpful or instructor grading process was not clear or not helpful," assuming the original question was perfectly parsed. I doubt that's what you're looking for. I would also point out that your summary, assuming it contains some form of each response, won't really be any faster for the reviewer to read. You may be underestimating both the natural ambiguity of the English language and the specificity of your desired result.