Question Generation Microservice

This microservice generates questions automatically for slide/deck content

The service makes use of DBPediaSpotlight to annotate text and find DBPedia resources in it.

Prerequisites

The service requires JDK 8, cURL, docker and maven to run.

Running The Service

To start the service, simply clone the repo and run the run.sh shell script.

The script pulls a pre-built docker image (containing tomcat) from docker hub and runs it. This starts a tomcat server at http://localhost:8080. Then maven deploys a war file to tomcat.

The username/password for the tomcat server is set in the tomcat-users.xml and the server settings in server.xml. Both are located in the mytomcatdocker folder.

REST Endpoints

Questions from Decks

GET /qgen/{type}/{level}/{deckID}

This endpoint is for getting questions for a deck by passing the question type, difficulty level and deck id.

The type can be either "gap-fill", "select" or "whoami" (without quotes).

The difficulty level can be either "easy" or "hard" (without quotes).

An example is shown below:

curl -X GET http://localhost:8080/qgen/select/hard/1573

Questions from Text

This endpoint is for getting questions for some text by passing the question type, difficulty level and text.

POST /qgen/{type}/{level}/text

The type and level is the same as the shown previously.

An example cURL request is shown below:

curl -X POST \
  http://localhost:8080/qgen/gap-fill/easy/text \
  -H 'content-type: text/plain' \
  -d 'Germany won the 2014 FIFA World Cup.'

Running with the spotlight docker container (Production Environment)

One can also run a container of DBPediaSpotlight on the same host as this one and communicate with it.

This of course makes the solution purely local because no requests would be made to the spotlight web service, but extra effort is required to run this as of now.

For doing so, one needs to do the following (before running the tomcat docker container):

Build the spotlight docker container as shown on the spotlight-docker repo

Then run the spotlight container with the name "spotlight" (without quotes) like this:

docker run -i --name spotlight -p 2222:80 english_spotlight spotlight.sh

Once the spotlight container is up and running, run the shell script with an argument "prod":

./run.sh prod

The prod argument will use the production docker container designed to run with the spotlight container.

Both dev and prod images are available on DockerHub here.