Taking up the Gaokao Challenge: An Information Retrieval Approach

Abstract

Answering questions in a university's entrance examination like Gaokao in China challenges AI technology. As a preliminary attempt to take up this challenge, we focus on multiple-choice questions in Gaokao, and propose a three-stage approach that exploits and extends information retrieval techniques. Taking Wikipedia as the source of knowledge, our approach obtains knowledge relevant to a question by retrieving pages from Wikipedia via string matching and context-based disambiguation, and then ranks and filters pages using multiple strategies to draw critical evidence, based on which the truth of each option is assessed via relevance-based entailment. It achieves encouraging results on real-life questions in recent history tests, significantly outperforming baseline approaches. PDF