SPAN: Understanding a Question with Its Support Answers

Matching a question to its best answer is a common task in community question answering. In this paper, we focus on the non-factoid questions and aim to pick out the best answer from its candidate answers. Most of the existing deep models directly measure the similarity between question and answer by their individual sentence embeddings. In order to tackle the problem of the information lack in question’s descriptions and the lexical gap between questions and answers, we propose a novel deep architecture namely SPAN in this paper. Specifically we introduce support answers to help understand the question, which are defined as the best answers of those similar questions to the original one. Then we can obtain two kinds of similarities, one is between question and the candidate answer, and the other one is between support answers and the candidate answer. The matching score is finally generated by combining them. Experiments on Yahoo! Answers demonstrate that SPAN can outperform the baseline models.