If You Can't Beat Them Join Them: Handcrafted Features Complement Neural Nets for Non-Factoid Answer Reranking
Dasha Bogdanova, Jennifer Foster, Daria Dzendzik, Qun Liu · 2017
We show that a neural approach to the task of non-factoid answer reranking can benefit from the inclusion of tried-and-tested handcrafted features.We present a novel neural network architecture based on a combination of recurrent neural networks that are used to encode questions and answers, and a multilayer perceptron.We show how this approach can be combined with additional features, in particular, the discourse features presented by Jansen et al. (2014).Our neural approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on a public dataset from Yahoo! Answers and its performance is further improved by incorporating the discourse features.Additionally, we present a new dataset of Ask Ubuntu questions where the hybrid approach also achieves good results.