Automatic Answer Validation System on English language

We present an Answer Validation System (AV) based on Textual Entailment and Question Answering. The important features used to develop the AV system are Named Entity Recognition, Textual Entailment, Question-Answer type Analysis and Chunk Boundary and Dependency relations. Separate AV modules have been developed for each of these features. We first combine the question and the answer into Hypothesis (H) and the Supporting Text as Text (T) to check the entailment relation as either “VALIDATED” or “REJECTED”. The important lexical features used for the Textual Entailment Module in the present system are: WordNet based unigram match, bigram match and skip-gram. The results obtained from the four answer validation modules are integrated using a voting technique. Evaluation scores obtained on the AVE 2008 test set show 67% precision for “VALIDATED” decisions.