Sanity check: A strong alignment and information retrieval baseline for question answering

Vikas Yadav, Rebecca Sharp, Mihai Surdeanu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

While increasingly complex approaches to question answering (QA) have been proposed, the true gain of these systems, particularly with respect to their expensive training requirements, can be in- flated when they are not compared to adequate baselines. Here we propose an unsupervised, simple, and fast alignment and informa- tion retrieval baseline that incorporates two novel contributions: a one-to-many alignment between query and document terms and negative alignment as a proxy for discriminative information. Our approach not only outperforms all conventional baselines as well as many supervised recurrent neural networks, but also approaches the state of the art for supervised systems on three QA datasets. With only three hyperparameters, we achieve 47% P@1 on an 8th grade Science QA dataset, 32.9% P@1 on a Yahoo! answers QA dataset and 64% MAP on WikiQA.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
Pages1217-1220
Number of pages4
ISBN (Electronic)9781450356572
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 27 2018
Externally publishedYes
Event41st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018 - Ann Arbor, United States
Duration: Jul 8 2018Jul 12 2018

Publication series

Name41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018

Other

Other41st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2018
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAnn Arbor
Period7/8/187/12/18

Keywords

  • Answer reranking
  • Information retrieval
  • Question answering
  • Unsupervised system

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Graphics and Computer-Aided Design
  • Information Systems

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