CBC-Question-Answering

Designing a question answering system to answer questions collected from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation webpage for kids.

This program would take the input file path as a command line argument (The input.txt file is under testing folder). After running the instructions below, the output file will be writen under the testing folder.

External Sources

• spaCy – https://spacy.io/
• scikit-learn – http://scikit-learn.org/stable/

Estimated Running Time

• At most five minutes

Setting Up & Running The Application

With a script file:

(NOTE: If this script file does not work properly, please follow the direction to set it up without a script file below)

./qa.sh

Without a script file:

pip install --user virtualenv
mkdir env
python -m virtualenv env -p /home/u1141153/python/bin/python3.5
source env/bin/activate.csh
pip install spacy
python -m spacy download en
pip install -U scikit-learn
python qa.py testing/input.txt

Other Information

• CADE Lab Machine: LAB2–29
• Problems: the shell script for installing spacy and scikit-learn does not work correctly all the time. So if that happens, please follow the instructions provided above.

Scoring Result

FINAL RESULTS
AVERAGE RECALL =    0.4853  (244.60 / 504)
AVERAGE PRECISION = 0.3229  (140.14 / 434)
AVERAGE F-MEASURE = 0.3878

Authors

• Tarun Sunkaraneni – load document files, format response file, find the best sentence list, and extract out the answer from the list of best sentence list
• Mia Ngo – write the README, write the shell script, set up the virtual machine environment for external applications, and extract out the answer from the list of best sentence list