sJanta: An Open Domain Question Answering System

Abstract. This paper reports on the participation of the system namely \sJanta " at NII Testbeds and Community for Information Access Re-search Project 11 (NTCIR-11) Question Answering (QA)-Lab English sub-task. sJanta is a modular question answering system that can an-swer multiple choice questions given in English natural language. We use English Wikipedia as knowledge-base. At rst we retrieved Wikipedia ar-ticles for the question. After nding the Wikipedia articles, we retrieved question specic passages. Then, we did dependency parsing, question context analysis and semantic similarity matching to score the answer choices. Finally, the best score-generating answer choice was picked as the answer. Although sJanta applied very simple technique in answering the questions, performance of the system is quite promising