A Question Classification Method Combining Domain Ontology and Question Focus

Question classification is one of most important tasks of question analysis in question answer system. A novel question classification method combining domain ontology and question focus is proposed in this article. First, with the supports of predefined structure of question focus and extracting rules, the semantic representation of question focus is fetched from the results of shallow semantic analysis including dependency analysis and semantic role labeling. Then, questions are labeled with the IDs of question objects in domain ontology. Thus, according to the fact of "same questions have same focus, and questions with different focuses are of different questions", questions with same focus are classified into the same category. The experimental result found that 93.91% accuracy for 1 905 special questions in restricted domain of computer troubleshooting could be achieved by using the proposed method. It demonstrates the validity of question focus and domain ontology in question classification task.