LIMSI-CNRS@CLEF 2014: Invalidating Answers for Multiple Choice Question Answering

This paper describes our participation to the Entrance Exams Task of CLEF 2014’s Question Answering Track. The goal is to answer multiple-choice questions on short texts. Our system first retrieves passages relevant to the question, through lexical expansion involving a structured use of the Simple English Wiktionary and WordNet. Then it extracts predicate-argument structures (PAS) from each answer choice and aligns them to PAS found in the passages retrieved in the first step. Finally, manually crafted rules are applied to those alignments to try to invalidate answer choices. If enough answer choices are thus invalidated, we make a decision on the remaining answer choices based on their alignment scores with the passages. We submitted several runs in the task, only one of which reached the random baseline (c@1 of 0.25). In the last section, we provide an analysis of the differences between our relatively good results obtained on trial data and the poor performance of our test run.