An encoding unit transforms a piece of text divided into a plurality of spans that are subdivided units of the piece of text and a question which have been input into a vector representation sequence representing a meaning of a span and the question based on the piece of text and the question which have been input using a pre-trained encoding model for transforming input text into a vector representation sequence representing a meaning of the input text. For each of the spans, an evidence extraction unit estimates an evidence score indicating the degree to which the span is suitable as the evidence for extracting the answer using a pre-trained extraction model for calculating the evidence score based on the vector representation sequence.
ANSWER GENERATING DEVICE, ANSWER LEARNING DEVICE, ANSWER GENERATING METHOD, AND ANSWER GENERATING PROGRAM