Question Classification using Semantic, Syntactic and Lexical features

ABSTRACT Question classification is very important for question answering. This paper present our research work on question classification through machine learning approach. In order to train the learning model, we designed a rich set of features that are predictive of question categories. An important component of question answering systems is question classification. The task of question classification is to predict the entity type of the answer of a natural language question. Question classification is typically done using machine learning techniques. Different lexical, syntactical and semantic features can be extracted from a question. In this work we combined lexical, syntactic and semantic features which improve the accuracy of classification. Furthermore, we adopted three different classifiers: Nearest Neighbors (NN), Naïve Bayes (NB), and Support Vector Machines (SVM) using two kinds of features: bag-of-words and bag-of n grams. Furthermore, we discovered that when we take SVM classifier and combine the semantic, syntactic, lexical feature we found that it will improve the accuracy of classification. We tested our proposed approaches on the well-known UIUC dataset and succeeded to achieve a new record on the accuracy of classification on this dataset