Improved answer selection for factoid questions

Abstract

In recent years, question and answer systems and information retrieval have been widely used by web users. The purpose of these systems is to find answers to users' questions. These systems consist of several components that the most essential of which is the Answer Selection, which finds the most relevant answer. In related works, the proposed models used lexical features to measure the similarity of sentences, but in recent works, the line of research has changed. They used deep neural networks. In the deep neural networks, early, recurrent neural networks were used due to the sequencing structure of the text, but in state of the art works, convolutional neural networks are used. We represent a new method based on deep neural network algorithms in this research. This method attempts to find the correct answer to a given question from the pool of responses. Our proposed method uses wide convolution instead of narrow convolution, concatenates sparse features vector into feature vector and uses dropout in order to rank candidate answers of the user's question semantically. The results show a 1.01% improvement at the MAP and a 0.2% improvement at the MRR metrics than the best previous model. The experiments show using context-sensitive interactions between input sentences is useful for finding the best answer. © 2019 IEEE.