Function-Based Question Classification for General QA

In contrast with the booming increase of internet data, state-of-art QA (question answering) systems, otherwise, concerned data from specific domains or resources such as search engine snippets, online forums and Wikipedia in a somewhat isolated way. Users may welcome a more general QA system for its capability to answer questions of various sources, integrated from existed specialized sub-QA engines. In this framework, question classification is the primary task. However, the current paradigms of question classification were focused on some specified type of questions, i.e. factoid questions, which are inappropriate for the general QA. In this paper, we propose a new question classification paradigm, which includes a question taxonomy suitable to the general QA and a question classifier based on MLN (Markov logic network), where rule-based methods and statistical methods are unified into a single framework in a fuzzy discriminative learning approach. Experiments show that our method outperforms traditional question classification approaches.