Data Envelopment Analysis of linguistic features and passage relevance for open-domain Question Answering

Abstract

Question Answering (QA) systems play an important role in today’s human–computer interaction systems. QA performance can be significantly improved using effective answer passage retrieval and ranking techniques. Our focus in this paper is on both non machine learning-based and deep learning-based passage retrieval and ranking systems for QA to leverage linguistic features within the text of questions and passages and improve passage ranking effectiveness. We propose a decoupled linguistic and linear programming-based approach for passage ranking using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique to improve over well-established answer passage retrieval techniques. Our method scores passages using information retrieval and deep learning relevance metrics, represents retrieved passages using their relevance scores and several linguistic features, and finally makes use of DEA to re-rank the retrieved list of passages. The high effectiveness and significance of our proposed passage ranking method is demonstrated based on several experiments that we have conducted on a standard benchmark data set.