Mining Compatible/Incompatible Entities from Question and Answering via Yes/No Answer Classification using Distant Label Expansion

Product Community Question Answering (PCQA) provides useful information about products and their features (aspects) that may not be well addressed by product descriptions and reviews. We observe that a product’s compatibility issues with other products are frequently discussed in PCQA and such issues are more frequently addressed in accessories, i.e., via a yes/no question “Does this mouse work with windows 10?”. In this paper, we address the problem of extracting compatible and incompatible products from yes/no questions in PCQA. This problem can naturally have a two-stage framework: first, we perform Complementary Entity (product) Recognition (CER) on yes/no questions; second, we identify the polarities of yes/no answers to assign the complementary entities a compatibility label (compatible, incompatible or unknown). We leverage an existing unsupervised method for the first stage and a 3-class classifier by combining a distant PU-learning method (learning from positive and unlabeled examples) together with a binary classifier for the second stage. The benefit of using distant PU-learning is that it can help to expand more implicit yes/no answers without using any human annotated data. We conduct experiments on 4 products to show that the proposed method is effective.