UWNLP at the NTCIR-12 Short Text Conversation Task

In this paper, we describe our submission to the NTCIR12 Short Text Conversation task. We consider short text conversation as a community Question-Answering problem, hence we solve this task in three steps: First, we retrieve a set of candidate posts from a pre-built indexing service. Second, these candidate posts are ranked according to their similarity with the original input post. Finally, we rank the comments to the top-ranked posts and output these comments as answers. Two ranking models and three comment selection strategies have been introduced to generate five runs. Among them, our best approach receives performances of mean nDCG@1 0.2767, mean P+ 0.4284 and mean nERR@10 0.4095.