  With the development of community based question answering (Q&A) services, a
large scale of Q&A archives have been accumulated and are an important
information and knowledge resource on the web. Question and answer matching has
been attached much importance to for its ability to reuse knowledge stored in
these systems: it can be useful in enhancing user experience with recurrent
questions. In this paper, we try to improve the matching accuracy by overcoming
the lexical gap between question and answer pairs. A Word Embedding based
Correlation (WEC) model is proposed by integrating advantages of both the
translation model and word embedding, given a random pair of words, WEC can
score their co-occurrence probability in Q&A pairs and it can also leverage the
continuity and smoothness of continuous space word representation to deal with
new pairs of words that are rare in the training parallel text. An experimental
study on Yahoo! Answers dataset and Baidu Zhidao dataset shows this new
method's promising potential.
