Answering the question you wish they had asked: The impact of paraphrasing for question answering

Abstract

State-of-the-art Question Answering (QA) systems are very sensitive to variations in the phrasing of an information need. Finding the preferred language for such a need is a valuable task. We investigate that claim by adopting a simple MT-based paraphrasing technique and evaluating QA system performance on paraphrased questions. We found a potential increase of 35% in MRR with respect to the original question.