Reading Comprehension at Entrance Exams 2015

This article presents the participation of Synapse Développement to the CLEF 2015 Entrance Exam campaign (QA track) for English and French languages. Since fifteen years, our company works on Question Answering domain. Recently our work concentrated on Machine Reading and Natural Language understanding. Thus, the Entrance Exam evaluation is an excellent opportunity to measure the results of this work. The developed system is based on a deep syntactic and semantic analysis with anaphora resolution and some inference mechanisms. The results of this analysis are saved in sophisticated structures based on clause description (CDS = Clause Description Structure). For this evaluation, we added a dedicated module to compare CDS from texts, questions and answers. This module measures the degree of correspondence between these elements, taking into account the type of answer awaited. We participated in English and French languages. This run obtains the best results (52 good answers on 89 in English and 50 on 89 in French). So, in English and French, our system can pass the entrance exam for University!