Deep Read

Abstract

This paper describes initial work on <b>Deep Read</b>, an automated reading comprehension system that accepts arbitrary text input (a story) and answers questions about it. We have acquired a corpus of 60 development and 60 test stories of 3^rd to 6^th grade material; each story is followed by short-answer questions (an answer key was also provided). We used these to construct and evaluate a baseline system that uses pattern matching (bag-of-words) techniques augmented with additional automated linguistic processing (stemming, name identification, semantic class identification, and pronoun resolution). This simple system retrieves the sentence containing the answer 30--40% of the time.