A Pipeline Approach to Free-Description Question Answering in Chinese Gaokao Reading Comprehension

This study attempted to answer complicated free-description questions in Chinese Gaokao Reading comprehension (RC) tasks. We found that quite a few questions can be answered by extracting sentences from the document and combining them, so we used a pipeline approach with two components: Answer sentence extraction (ASE) and Answer sentence fusion (ASF). Semantic vector similarity and topical distribution similarity were explored for ASE. Integer linear programming strategy was used for ASF, which combined dependencies with the language model, based on word importance. As a first step towards the new challenge, we obtained some encouraging results on actual exam questions in Chinese subject's RC tasks of Beijing Gaokao, which helped us obtain insights into techniques needed to solve real-word complex questions.