What Is Not in the Bag of Words for <i>Why</i>-QA?

Abstract

While developing an approach to why-QA, we extended a passage retrieval system that uses off-the-shelf retrieval technology with a re-ranking step incorporating structural information. We get significantly higher scores in terms of MRR@150 (from 0.25 to 0.34) and success@10. The 23% improvement that we reach in terms of MRR is comparable to the improvement reached on different QA tasks by other researchers in the field, although our re-ranking approach is based on relatively lightweight overlap measures incorporating syntactic constituents, cue words, and document structure.