QCRI: Answer Selection for Community Question Answering - Experiments for Arabic and English

This paper describes QCRI’s participation in SemEval-2015 Task 3 “Answer Selection in Community Question Answering”, which tar-geted real-life Web forums, and was offered in both Arabic and English. We apply a super-vised machine learning approach considering a manifold of features including among others word n-grams, text similarity, sentiment anal-ysis, the presence of specific words, and the context of a comment. Our approach was the best performing one in the Arabic subtask and the third best in the two English subtasks.