Modeling relational information in question-answer pairs with convolutional neural networks

In this paper, we propose convolutional neural networks for learning an optimal representation of question and answer sentences. Their main aspect is the use of relational information given by the matches between words from the two members of the pair. The matches are encoded as embeddings with additional parameters (dimensions), which are tuned by the network. These allows for better capturing interactions between questions and answers, resulting in a significant boost in accuracy. We test our models on two widely used answer sentence selection benchmarks. The results clearly show the effectiveness of our relational information, which allows our relatively simple network to approach the state of the art.