Code mixed cross script factoid question classification - A deep learning approach

Abstract

Before the advent of the Internet era, code-mixing was mainly used in the spoken form. However, with the recent popular informal networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc., in social media, code-mixing is being used more and more in written form. User-generated social media content is becoming an increasingly important resource in applied linguistics. Recent trends in social media usage have led to a proliferation of studies on social media content. Multilingual social media users often write native language content in non-native script (cross-script). Recently Banerjee et al. [9] introduced the code-mixed cross-script question answering research problem and reported that the ever increasing social media content could serve as a potential digital resource for less-computerized languages to build question answering systems. Question classification is a core task in question answering in which questions are assigned a class or a number of classes which denote the expected answer type(s). In this research work, we address the question classification task as part of the code-mixed cross-script question answering research problem. We combine deep learning framework with feature engineering to address the question classification task and enhance the state-of-the-art question classification accuracy by over 4% for code-mixed cross-script questions.