WUST System at NTCIR-13 Short Text Conversation Task

Our WUST team has participated in the Chinese subtask of the NTCIR-13 STC (Short Text Conversation) Task. This paper describes our approach to the STC and discusses the official results of our system. Our system constructs the model to search the appropriate comments for the query derived from the given post. In our system, we hold the hypothesis that the relevant posts tend to have the common comments. Given the query q, we firstly adopt the framework to extract the topic words from q, and retrieve the initial set of post-comment pairs, and then the post-comment pairs are used to match and rank to produce the final ranked list. The core of the system is to calculate the similarity between the responses and the given query q. The experimental results using the NTCIREVAL tool suggest that our system should be improved by combining with knowledge and features.