Improving question retrieval in community question answering service using dependency relations and question classification

To build an effective community question answering (cQA) service, determining ways to obtain questions similar to an input query question is a significant research issue. The major challenges for question retrieval in cQA are related to solving the lexical gap problem and estimating the relevance between questions. In this study, we first solve the lexical gap problem using a translation-based language model (TRLM). Thereafter, we determine features and methods that are competent for estimating the relevance between two questions. For this purpose, we explore ways to use the results of a dependency parser and question classification for category information. Head-dependent pairs are first extracted as bigram features, called dependency bigrams, from the analysis results of the dependency parser. The probability of each category is estimated using the softmax approach based on the scores of the classification results. Subsequently, we propose two retrieval models—the dependency-based model (DM) and category-based model (CM)—and they are applied to the previous model, TRLM. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods significantly improve the performance of question retrieval in cQA services.