QU-BIGIR at SemEval 2017 Task 3: Using Similarity Features for Arabic Community Question Answering Forums

Proceedings of the 11th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluations (SemEval-2017), pages 360–364, Vancouver, Canada, August 3 - 4, 2017. c⃝2017 Association for Computational Linguistics QU-BIGIR at SemEval 2017 Task 3: Using Similarity Features for Arabic Community Question Answering Forums Marwan Torki and Maram Hasanain and Tamer Elsayed Qatar University Department of Computer Science & Engineering Doha, Qatar {mtorki,maram.hasanain,telsayed}@qu.edu.qa Abstract In this paper, we describe our QU-BIGIR system for the Arabic subtask D of the Se- mEval 2017 Task 3. Our approach builds on our participation in the past version of the same subtask. This year, our system uses different similarity features that en- codes lexical and semantic pairwise sim- ilarity of text pairs. In addition to well- known similarity measures such as cosine similarity, we use other measures based on the summary statistics of word embedding representation for a given text. To rank a list of candidate question-answer pairs for a given question, we train a linear SVM classifier over our similarity features. Our best resulting run came second in subtask D with a very competitive performance to the first-ranking system. 1 Introduction The ubiquitous presence of community question answering (CQA) websites has motivated research on building automatic question answering (QA) systems that can benefit from previously-answered questions to answer newly-posed ones (Shtok et al., 2012). A core functionality of such sys- tems is their ability to effectively rank previously- suggested answers with respect to their de- gree/probability of relevance to a posted question. Ranking is vital to push away irrelevant and low quality answers, which are commonplace in CQA as they are generally open with no restrictions on who can post or answer questions. To this effect, SemEval 2017 Task 3 “Com- munity Question Answering” has emphasized the ranking component in the main task of the chal- lenge. We have participated in Task 3-Subtask D (Arabic Subtask) which is confined to the main Question: ام يھ يلاودلا امو يھ اھبابسا Candidate question-answer pairs (QApairs): Q : لھ ليلاود مدقلا ضارعا دجوي يعم يلاود يف مدقلا نكلو بلطا مكنم يديوزت ضارعاب يلاودلا لكاشملاو يتلا اھببسي A :ضرعلا رثكلأا اعويش وھ ھظرو ةدرولأا ةخفتنم ىلع ةھجاو قاسلا صيخشتلااو نوكي نم للاخ صحفلا يبطلا رشابملا جلاعلاو نوكيس قفو ببسلا Q :ىھام ىلاود هجردلا هثلاثلا امو اھبابسا فيكو متي هياقولا اھنم A :يلاودلا يھ هرابع نع عسوت يف هدرولاا هيولعلا هقطنملل هباصملا اھلو ريثكلا نم بابسلاا لمحلاك هنمسلاو سولجلاو هدمل هليوط متيو ادج هياقولا اھنم نع قيرط مدع فوقولا هدمل هليوط ةسراممو هضيارلا لكشب ربكا سبلو براوج هصصخم هذھل تلااحلا عنمل مقافتلا Q :لھ قورعلا هيوتلملا لكشب حضاو يف مدقلا ربتعت نم يلاودلا لھو يلاودلا اھل راطخا اذا مل متي اھجلاع A :نكمي نأ رجفنت يلاودلا تحت دلجلا ىدؤتو ىلإ تامدك تابسرتو ةيومد تاغبصتو تحت دلجلا نكميو نأ يدؤت ىلإ تاحرقت .دق لمشي جلاع يلاود نيقاسلا ددع نم ريبادتلا يتلا فدھت ىلا فيفختلا نم ةدح ضارعلأا وأ دحلا نم اھروطت Q اھليزأ :انا باش يرمع ٣٧ةنس يناعأو نم نم يلاود ةدرولأا يف نيقاسلا فيكف A : بلاغلا هنأ ةجاحب لاصئتسلا اذإ تناك ةريبك …

Content truncated to 500 words