# Science Question Answering using Instructional Materials

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1602.04375 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.04375/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 13 Feb 2016.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Encoding Explanatory Knowledge for Zero-shot Science Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.05737/) (2021)
- [Automated Answer Validation using Text Similarity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08688/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We provide a solution for elementary science test using instructional materials. We posit that there is a hidden structure that explains the correctness of an answer given the question and instructional materials and present a unified max-margin framework that learns to find these hidden structures (given a corpus of question-answer pairs and instructional materials), and uses what it learns to answer novel elementary science questions. Our evaluation shows that our framework outperforms several strong baselines.