In this paper we present the system for Answer Selection and Ranking in Community Question Answering, which we build as part of our participation in SemEval-2017 Task 3. We develop a Support Vector Machine (SVM) based system that makes use of textual, domain-specific, word-embedding and topic-modeling features. In addition, we propose a novel method for dialogue chain identification in comment threads. Our primary submission won subtask C, outperforming other systems in all the primary evaluation metrics. We performed well in other English subtasks, ranking third in subtask A and eighth in subtask B. We also developed open source toolkits for all the three English subtasks by the name cQARank [https://github.com/TitasNandi/cQARank].

This paper reports the STS-UHH participation in the SemEval 2017 shared Task 1 of Semantic Textual Similarity (STS). Overall, we submitted 3 runs covering monolingual and cross-lingual STS tracks. Our participation involves two approaches: unsupervised approach, which estimates a word alignment-based similarity score, and supervised approach, which combines dependency graph similarity and coverage features with lexical similarity measures using regression methods. We also present a way on ensembling both models. Out of 84 submitted runs, our team best multi-lingual run has been ranked 12th in overall performance with correlation of 0.61, 7th among 31 participating teams.