Biblio

Question Answering system(QA) plays an increasingly important role in the Internet age. The proportion of using the QA is getting higher and higher for the Internet users to obtain knowledge and solve problems, especially in the modern agricultural filed. However, the answer quality in QA varies widely due to the agricultural expert's level. Answer quality assessment is important. Due to the lexical gap between questions and answers, the existing approaches are not quite satisfactory. A practical approach RCAS is proposed to rank the candidate answers, which utilizes the support sets to reduce the impact of lexical gap between questions and answers. Firstly, Similar questions are retrieved and support sets are produced with their high-quality answers. Based on the assumption that high quality answers would also have intrinsic similarity, the quality of candidate answers are then evaluated through their distance from the support sets. Secondly, Different from the existing approaches, previous knowledge from similar question-answer pairs are used to bridge the straight lexical and semantic gaps between questions and answers. Experiments are implemented on approximately 0.15 million question-answer pairs about agriculture, dietetics and food from Yahoo! Answers. The results show that our approach can rank the candidate answers more precisely.