  Statistical models such as those derived from Item Response Theory (IRT)
enable the assessment of students on a specific subject, which can be useful
for several purposes (e.g., learning path customization, drop-out prediction).
However, the questions have to be assessed as well and, although it is possible
to estimate with IRT the characteristics of questions that have already been
answered by several students, this technique cannot be used on newly generated
questions. In this paper, we propose a framework to train and evaluate models
for estimating the difficulty and discrimination of newly created Multiple
Choice Questions by extracting meaningful features from the text of the
question and of the possible choices. We implement one model using this
framework and test it on a real-world dataset provided by CloudAcademy, showing
that it outperforms previously proposed models, reducing by 6.7% the RMSE for
difficulty estimation and by 10.8% the RMSE for discrimination estimation. We
also present the results of an ablation study performed to support our features
choice and to show the effects of different characteristics of the questions'
text on difficulty and discrimination.
