A question answering system for reading comprehension tests

Abstract

In this paper it is presented a methodology for tackling the problem of question answering for reading comprehension tests. The implemented system accepts a document as input and it answers multiple choice questions about it. It uses the Lucene information retrieval engine for carrying out information extraction employing additional automated linguistic processing such as stemming, anaphora resolution and part-of-speech tagging. The proposed approach validates the answers, by comparing the text retrieved by Lucene for each question with respect to its candidate answers. For this purpose, a validation based on textual entailment is executed. We have evaluated the experiments carried out in order to verify the quality of the methodology proposed using two corpora widely used in international forums. The obtained results show that the proposed system selects the correct answer to a given question with a percentage of 33-37%, a result that overcomes the average of all the runs submitted in the QA4MRE task of the CLEF 2011 and 2012. © 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.