A question answering device includes: a general word vector converter converting a question and an answer to semantic vectors in accordance with general context; a general sentence level CNN 214, in response to similarities of semantic vectors between words in question and answer and to strength of causality between the words, for weighting each semantic vector to calculate sentence level representations of the question and the answer; a general passage level CNN 218, in response to similarity between sentence level representations of question and answer, and to strength of relation of vectors in the sentence level representations viewed from causality, for weighting the sentence level representation to calculate a passage level representation for the question and answer passage; and a classifier determining whether or not an answer is a correct answer, based on the similarities between outputs from CNNs 214 and 218.
Non-factoid question-answering device