UWNLP at the NTCIR-12 Short Text Conversation Task

Anqi Cui, Guangyu Feng, Borui Ye, Kun Xiong, Xing Yi Liu, Ming Li

Abstract: In this paper, we describe our submission to the NTCIR- 12 Short Text Conversation task. We consider short text conversation as a community Question-Answering problem, hence we solve this task in three steps: First, we retrieve a set of candidate posts from a pre-built indexing service. Second, these candidate posts are ranked according to their similarity with the original input post. Finally, we rank the comments to the top-ranked posts and output these comments as answers. Two ranking models and three com- ment selection strategies have been introduced to generate five runs. Among them, our best approach receives per- formances of mean nDCG@1 0.2767, mean P+ 0.4284 and mean nERR@10 0.4095.