Answer Extraction from Passage Graph for Question Answering

In question answering, answer extraction aims topin-point the exact answer from passages. However,most previous methods perform such extractionon each passage separately, without consideringclues provided in other passages. This paperpresents a novel approach to extract answers byfully leveraging connections among different passages.Specially, extraction is performed on a PassageGraph which is built by adding links uponmultiple passages. Different passages are connectedby linking words with the same stem. Weuse the factor graph as our model for answer extraction.Experimental results on multiple QA datasets demonstrate that our method significantly improvesthe performance of answer extraction.