A long short-term memory model for answer sentence selection in question answering

Abstract

In this paper, we present an approach that address the answer sentence selection problem for question answering. The proposed method uses a stacked bidirectional Long-Short Term Memory (BLSTM) network to sequentially read words from question and answer sentences, and then outputs their relevance scores. Unlike prior work, this approach does not require any syntactic parsing or external knowledge resources such as WordNet which may not be available in some domains or languages. The full system is based on a combination of the stacked BLSTM relevance model and keywords matching. The results of our experiments on a public benchmark dataset from TREC show that our system outperforms previous work which requires syntactic features and external knowledge resources.