Learning Question Focus and Semantically Related Features from Web Search Results for Chinese Question Classification

Abstract

Recently, some machine learning techniques like support vector machines are employed for question classification. However, these techniques heavily depend on the availability of large amounts of training data, and may suffer many difficulties while facing various new questions from the real users on the Web. To mitigate the problem of lacking sufficient training data, in this paper, we present a simple learning method that explores Web search results to collect more training data automatically by a few seed terms (question answers). In addition, we propose a novel semantically related feature model (SRFM), which takes advantage of question focuses and their semantically related features learned from the larger number of collected training data to support the determination of question type. Our experimental results show that the proposed new learning method can obtain better classification performance than the bigram language modeling (LM) approach for the questions with untrained question focuses.