Domain adaptive answer extraction for discussion boards.

Answer extraction from discussion boards is an extensively studied problem. Most of the existing work is focused on supervised methods for extracting answers using similarity features and forum-specific features. Although this works well for the domain or forum data that it has been trained on, it is difficult to use the same models for a domain where the vocabulary is different and some forum specific features may not be available. In this poster, we report initial results of a domain adaptive answer extractor that performs the extraction in two steps: a) an answer recognizer identifies the sentences in a post which are likely to be answers, and b) a domain relevance module determines the domain significance of the identified answer. We use domain independent methodology that can be easily adapted to any given domain with minimum effort.