In this paper we propose a system for re-ranking answers for a given question. Our method builds on a siamese CNN architecture which is extended by two attention mechanisms. The approach was evaluated on the datasets of the SemEval-2017 competition for Community Question Answering (cQA), where it achieved 7 th place obtaining a MAP score of 86.24 points on the Question-Comment Similarity subtask.

This paper presents an entirely new, one-million-word annotated corpus for a comprehensive, machine-learning-based preprocessing of text in Modern Standard Arabic. Contrarily to the conventional pipeline architecture, we solve the NLP tasks of word segmentation, POS tagging and named entity recognition as a single sequence labeling task. This single-component configuration results in a faster operation and is able to provide state-of-the-art precision and recall according to our evaluations. The fine-grained output tag set output by our annotator greatly simplifies downstream tasks such as lemmatization. Provided as a trained OpenNLP component, the annotator is publicly free for research purposes.

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In this paper we discuss several models we used to classify 25 city-level Arabic dialects in addition to Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) as part of MADAR shared task (sub-task 1). We propose an ensemble model of a group of experimentally designed best performing classifiers on a various set of features. Our system achieves an accuracy of 69.3% macro F1-score with an improvement of 1.4% accuracy from the baseline model on the DEV dataset. Our best run submitted model ranked as third out of 19 participating teams on the TEST dataset with only 0.12% macro F1-score behind the top ranked system.