Learning continuousword embedding with metadata for question retrieval in community question answering

Abstract

Community question answering (cQA) has become an important issue due to the popularity of cQA archives on the web. This paper is concerned with the problem of question retrieval. Question retrieval in cQA archives aims to find the existing questions that are semantically equivalent or relevant to the queried questions. However, the lexical gap problem brings about new challenge for question retrieval in cQA. In this paper, we propose to learn continuous word embeddings with metadata of category information within cQA pages for question retrieval. To deal with the variable size of word embedding vectors, we employ the framework of fisher kernel to aggregated them into the fixedlength vectors. Experimental results on large-scale real world cQA data set show that our approach can significantly outperform state-of-The-Art translation models and topic-based models for question retrieval in cQA.