English Run of Synapse Développement at Entrance Exams 2014

This article presents the participation of Synapse Développement to the CLEF 2014 Entrance Exam campaign (QA track). Since fifteen years, our company works on Question Answering domain. Recently our work concentrated on Machine Reading and Natural Language understanding. Thus, the Entrance Exam evaluation was an excellent opportunity to measure the results of this work. The developed system is based on a deep syntactic and semantic analysis with anaphora resolution. The results of this analysis are saved in sophisticated structures based on clause description (CDS = Clause Description Structure). For this evaluation, we added a dedicated module to compare CDS from texts, questions and answers. This module measures the degree of correspondence between these elements, taking into account the type of question, which means the type of answer awaited. We participate in English and French languages; this article focuses on the English run, comparing it with the French run whose final results were better. However our run for English obtains the best results in this language.