# RankQA: Neural Question Answering with Answer Re-Ranking

Source: [RankQA: Neural Question Answering with Answer Re-Ranking](<https://www.sota2.com/research/paper/68fa663a1e209131cea0ef76>)

Collection index: [llms.txt](<https://www.sota2.com/research/llms.txt>)

Data updated: 2025-10-25T21:45:30.461Z

Authors: Bernhard Kratzwald, Anna Eigenmann, Stefan Feuerriegel

Published: 2019-06-07T11:06:11.000Z

## Abstract

The conventional paradigm in neural question answering (QA) for narrative content is limited to a two-stage process: first, relevant text passages are retrieved and, subsequently, a neural network for machine comprehension extracts the likeliest answer. However, both stages are largely isolated in the status quo and, hence, information from the two phases is never properly fused. In contrast, this work proposes RankQA: RankQA extends the conventional two-stage process in neural QA with a third stage that performs an additional answer re-ranking. The re-ranking leverages different features that are directly extracted from the QA pipeline, i.e., a combination of retrieval and comprehension features. While our intentionally simple design allows for an efficient, data-sparse estimation, it nevertheless outperforms more complex QA systems by a significant margin: in fact, RankQA achieves state-of-the-art performance on 3 out of 4 benchmark datasets. Furthermore, its performance is especially superior in settings where the size of the corpus is dynamic. Here the answer re-ranking provides an effective remedy against the underlying noise-information trade-off due to a variable corpus size. As a consequence, RankQA represents a novel, powerful, and thus challenging baseline for future research in content-based QA.

## Recorded benchmark results

A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage.

## Original sources and implementation

[Original paper](<https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.03008>)

[PDF](<https://arxiv.org/pdf/1906.03008.pdf>)