A Multilingual Approach to Question Classification

Abstract

In this paper we present the Konstanz Resource of Questions (KRoQ), the first dependency-parsed, parallel multilingual corpus of information-seeking and non-information-seeking questions. In creating the corpus, we employ a linguistically motivated rule-based system that uses linguistic cues from one language to help classify and annotate questions across other languages. Our current corpus includes German, French, Spanish and Koine Greek. Based on the linguistically motivated heuristics we identify, a two-step scoring mechanism assigns intra- and inter-language scores to each question. Based on these scores, each question is classified as being either information seeking or non-information seeking. An evaluation shows that this mechanism correctly classifies questions in 79% of the cases. We release our corpus as a basis for further work in the area of question classification. It can be utilized as training and testing data for machine-learning algorithms, as corpus-data for theoretical linguistic questions or as a resource for further rule-based approaches to question identification.

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