Two Way Question Classification in Higher Education Domain

Abstract

Question classification plays vital role in Question Answering (QA) systems. The task of classifying a question to appropriate class is performed to predict the question type of the natural language question. In this paper, initially we have presented a brief overview of classification approaches adapted by different question answering systems so far and then propose a two-way question classification approach for higher education domain which not only identifies focus word and question class but also reduces answer search space within corpus comprise of question-answer pair, adding to the classification accuracy. For precise semantic interpretation of domain keywords, a domain specific dictionary is constructed which primarily have four domain word type. Classified features are built upon domain attributes in the form of constraints. The experiment proved the efficiency for restricted domain, even though we used quite simplistic approach.