Thread-Level Information for Comment Classification in Community Question Answering

Alberto Barrón-Cedeño, Simone Filice, Giovanni Da San Martino, Shafiq Joty, Lluís Màrquez, Preslav Nakov, Alessandro Moschitti


Abstract

Community Question Answering (cQA) is a new application of QA in a practical context, i.e., social forums. It presents new interesting challenges and research directions, e.g., exploiting the dependencies between the different comments of a thread to select the best answer for a given question. In this paper, we explored two ways of modeling such dependencies: (i) by designing specific features looking globally at the thread; and (ii) by applying structure prediction models. We trained and evaluated our models on data from SemEval-2015 Task 3 on Answer Selection in cQA. Our experiments show that: (i) the thread-level features consistently improve the performance for a variety of learning algorithms and evaluation measures, yielding state-of-the-art results; and (ii) using the sequential dependencies between the answer labels is not enough to improve the results, indicating that more information is needed in the joint model.