RAVE: A Fast Logic-Based Answer Validator

Abstract

RAVE (Real-time Answer Validation Engine) is a logic-based answer validator/selector designed for real-time question answering. Instead of proving a hypothesis for each answer, RAVE uses logic only for checking if a considered passage supports a correct answer at all. In this way parsing of the answers is avoided, yielding low validation/selection times. Machine learning is used for assigning local validation scores based on logical and shallow features. The subsequent aggregation of these local scores strives to be robust to duplicated information in the support passages. To achieve this, the effect of aggregation is controlled by the lexical diversity of the support passages for a given answer.