  Question answering (QA) has significantly benefitted from deep learning
techniques in recent years. However, domain-specific QA remains a challenge due
to the significant amount of data required to train a neural network. This
paper studies the answer sentence selection task in the Bible domain and answer
questions by selecting relevant verses from the Bible. For this purpose, we
create a new dataset BibleQA based on bible trivia questions and propose three
neural network models for our task. We pre-train our models on a large-scale QA
dataset, SQuAD, and investigate the effect of transferring weights on model
accuracy. Furthermore, we also measure the model accuracies with different
answer context lengths and different Bible translations. We affirm that
transfer learning has a noticeable improvement in the model accuracy. We
achieve relatively good results with shorter context lengths, whereas longer
context lengths decreased model accuracy. We also find that using a more modern
Bible translation in the dataset has a positive effect on the task.

Information Retrieval;Artificial Intelligence;Computation and Language;Machine Learning