Before revision: Many information retrieval and natural language processing  problems can be formalized as a semantic matchingtask. However, the existing work in this area has been focused in large part on the matching between short texts like finding answer spans, sentences and passages given a query or a natural language question.
After revision: Many information retrieval and natural language processing problems can be formalized as the task of semantic matching. Existing work in this area has been focused in large part on the matching between short texts like finding answer spans, sentences and passages given a query or a natural language question.