This paper describes the CMUQA entry into NTCIR QA Lab-3. CMUQA is an essay-question answering system that uses Wikipedia as its knowledge base. The essay-question portion of QA Lab-3 is composed of real exam questions from the University of Tokyo’s entrance exams which are focused on world history. The proposed system formulates answers to these questions using the following sequence of proces...

Our FRDC_QA team participated in the QA-Lab English subtask of the NTCIR-11. In this paper, we describe our system for solving real-world university entrance exam questions, which are related to world history. Wikipedia is used as the main external resource for our system. Since problems with choosing right/wrong sentence from multiple sentence choices account for about two-thirds of the total,...

This paper describes the Nara Institute of Science and Technology’s system for the entrance exam pilot task of CLEF 2013 QA4MRE. The core of the system is a similar to the system for the main task of CLEF 2013 QA4MRE. We use minimum error rate training (MERT) to train the weights of the model and also propose a novel method for MERT with the addition of a threshold that defines the certainty wi...

This paper describes the TU system that participated in the Entrance Exam Subtask of NTCIR-9 RITE. The system consists of two phases: alignment and entailment relation recognition. In the alignment phase, the system aligns words in the two sentences by exploiting diverse lexical resources such as entailment information, hypernym-hyponym relations and synonyms. Based on the alignments and relati...

In this paper, we present a system for automatically answering opendomain, multiple choice reading comprehension questions about short English narrative texts. The system is based on state-of-the-art text similarity measures, textual entailment metrics and coreference resolution and does not make use of any additional domain specific background knowledge. Each answer option is scored with a com...

This study aims at discovering whether university entrance exam (UEE), a high-stake selection test in Iran, influences the high school and pre-university EFL teachers` methodology and test development. The participants of this study included thirty high school and pre-university EFL teachers who were randomly selected from ten different schools. To answer the research questions, five types of m...

This study aimed at identifying the most frequent test-taking strategies used by successful Iranian male and female university entrance exam EFL applicants. To this end, 150 English major male and female freshman students who got admission to three reputable state universities of Isfahan, Shiraz, and Tehran were selected conveniently and purposively. The model used in this study was developed b...

This study aimed at investigating differential item functioning (DIF) on the Special English Test of the Iranian National University Entrance Exam (INUEE). The effect of gender and subject area was taken into account. The study utilized one-parameter IRT model with a sample of 36000 students who sat for the INUEE Special English Test in 2004 and/or 2005. The findings confirmed the presence of D...

The effects of affirmative action on the incentives to human capital accumulation are ambiguous from a theoretical perspective and scarce empirical evidence matter provides mixed results. In this paper, we address issue by investigating impacts Brazil’s Law Quotas students’ performance in college entrance exam, ENEM. We provide causal that law fostered pre-college accumulation, inducing student...