‪RDI-Cairo University team has won the second position in an international competition in “Semeval 2016 QA task”. In this part of the competition, the teams are given a question in the medical domain with 30 questions and their answers, then the sharing teams are asked to select the relevant questions/answers and to rank them according to their relevance to the given question‬.
‪This is important task in many applications; for example if there is a new query and we have many questions with their answers, but all questions with the same answers have different formulations. Then we should be able to select the most relevant answer(s) and avail it to the user. So basically it is a semantic analysis challenge. And the solution is based on machine learning algorithms, as they provide some training data‬.
RDI-Cairo University team has been invited after the beginning of the competition with few weeks. Despite the fact the team could not implement all the techniques it could think of, RDI-Cairo University team achieved the second position after the MIT team. The team consists of 4 M.Sc. students in Cairo University (with few others) and working on their masters in RDI research Lab under the supervision of Prof. Mohsen RASHWAN (EECE1977)‬.