  We investigate the task of distractor generation for multiple choice reading
comprehension questions from examinations. In contrast to all previous works,
we do not aim at preparing words or short phrases distractors, instead, we
endeavor to generate longer and semantic-rich distractors which are closer to
distractors in real reading comprehension from examinations. Taking a reading
comprehension article, a pair of question and its correct option as input, our
goal is to generate several distractors which are somehow related to the
answer, consistent with the semantic context of the question and have some
trace in the article. We propose a hierarchical encoder-decoder framework with
static and dynamic attention mechanisms to tackle this task. Specifically, the
dynamic attention can combine sentence-level and word-level attention varying
at each recurrent time step to generate a more readable sequence. The static
attention is to modulate the dynamic attention not to focus on question
irrelevant sentences or sentences which contribute to the correct option. Our
proposed framework outperforms several strong baselines on the first prepared
distractor generation dataset of real reading comprehension questions. For
human evaluation, compared with those distractors generated by baselines, our
generated distractors are more functional to confuse the annotators.
