Testing Lexical Approaches in QA4MRE

In this paper we describe our strategy in the course of our participation in the 2012 QA4MRE main task. We follow a lexical approach, based on both Word Proximity and similarity measures. In the former, we implement a method that was successfully applied in the “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” contest; in the later we use the notion of “extent”, that is, a passage that includes terms of the given questions or answers, and results from comparing the attained extents through widely known similarity measures such as Jaccard and Dice. Considering the 2011 QA4MRE competition, our results are promising, although still far from the ones attained by the winning system.

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