Journal of information and communication convergence engineering

The Korea Institute of Information and Commucation Engineering (한국정보통신학회)
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Conceptual Graph Matching Method for Reading Comprehension Tests

  • Zhang, Zhi-Chang (IR Lab, Computer Science and Technology School of Harbin Institute of Technology) ;
  • Zhang, Yu (Dept. computer science and technology at Harbin Institute of Technology) ;
  • Liu, Ting (Dept. computer science and technology at Harbin Institute of Technology) ;
  • Li, Sheng (Dept. computer science and technology at Harbin Institute of Technology)
  • Published : 2009.12.31
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Abstract

Reading comprehension (RC) systems are to understand a given text and return answers in response to questions about the text. Many previous studies extract sentences that are the most similar to questions as answers. However, texts for RC tests are generally short and facts about an event or entity are often expressed in multiple sentences. The answers for some questions might be indirectly presented in the sentences having few overlapping words with the questions. This paper proposes a conceptual graph matching method towards RC tests to extract answer strings. The method first represents the text and questions as conceptual graphs, and then extracts subgraphs for every candidate answer concept from the text graph. All candidate answer concepts will be scored and ranked according to the matching similarity between their sub-graphs and question graph. The top one will be returned as answer seed to form a concise answer string. Since the sub-graphs for candidate answer concepts are not restricted to only covering a single sentence, our approach improved the performance of answer extraction on the Remedia test data.

Keywords

References

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