Deep Transfer Learning for Question Classification Based on Semantic Information Features of Category Labels

Abstract

Question classification is an important component of the question answering system (QA system), which is designed to restrict the answer types and accurately locate the answers. Therefore, the classification results of the questions affect the quality and performance of the QA system. Most question classification methods in the past have relied on a large amount of manually labeled training data. However, in real situations, especially in new domains, it is very difficult to obtain a large amount of labeled data. Transfer learning is an effective approach to solve the problem with the scarcity of annotated data in new domains. We compare the effects of different deep transfer learning methods on cross-domain question classification. On the basis of the ALBERT fine-tuning model, we extract the category labels of the source domain, the question text, and the predicted category labels of the target domain as input to extract the category labels. Additionally, the semantic information of the category labels is extracted to achieve cross-domain question classification. Furthermore, WordNet is used to expand the question, which further improves the classification accuracy of the target domain. Experimental results show that the above methods can further improve the classification accuracy in new domains based on deep transfer learning.