Abstract
We formalized and implemented a method for solving comprehension questions referring to underlined passages in Contemporary Japanese of the National Center Test. A target question consists of a text body extracted from a critical essay or novel, a question sentence, and five choices; the question sentence refers to an underlined passage in the text body and asks a question related to the passage, such as the interpretation of the passage, the reason for the author’s claim (in the essay), and the emotional state or feeling of a character (in the novel). Given a question, the method determines which text segment is the key to the question and selects the choice that is most similar to the segment. The method correctly solved more than half the “critical essay” questions in previous tests of the National Center Test.
