SimBow at SemEval-2017 Task 3: Soft-Cosine Semantic Similarity between Questions for Community Question Answering

This paper describes the SimBow system submitted at SemEval2017-Task3, for the question-question similarity subtask B. The proposed approach is a supervised combination of different unsupervised textual similarities. These textual similarities rely on the introduction of a relation matrix in the classical cosine similarity between bag-of-words, so as to get a softcosine that takes into account relations between words. According to the type of relation matrix embedded in the soft-cosine, semantic or lexical relations can be considered. Our system ranked first among the official submissions of subtask B.