Using re-ranking to boost deep learning based community question retrieval

Abstract

The current study presents a two-stage question retrieval approach which, in the first phase, retrieves similar questions for a given query using a deep learning based approach and in the second phase, re-ranks initially retrieved questions on the basis of inter-question similarities. The suggested deep learning based approach is trained using several surface features of texts and the associated weights are pre-trained using a deep generative model for better initialization. The proposed retrieval model outperforms standard baseline question retrieval approaches. The proposed re-ranking approach performs inference over a similarity graph constructed with the initially retrieved questions and re-ranks the questions based on their similarity with other relevant questions. Suggested re-ranking approach significantly improves the precision for the retrieval task.