Abstract
Intelligent question answering (QA) models
or chatbots automatically provide appropriate responses to questions posed by
users. In terms of generating continuous responses, they are divided into generative and retrieval-based
approaches. For retrieval-based QA models, the key issue is how to reduce the
search space. This research focuses on a retrieval-based approach and proposes
a classification intelligent question answering (CIQA) model. The CIQA model
contains two stages, namely a question classification stage and an answer
prediction stage. The first stage consists of building a classification ensemble
based on a training set. The second stage uses the first stage classification ensemble
to determine the appropriate categories for a test set and selects an
appropriate deep learning QA model based on a chosen category. A new benchmark
dataset for chatbot, SQuAD (Stanford question answering
dataset) 2.0, is
used to evaluate performance. Based on the outcome of our experiments, the
proposed CIQA model outperforms the baseline model and demonstrates the feasibility
of the proposed approach.
JEL classification numbers: M15, O35.
Keywords: Question answering, Ensemble learning, Deep learning,
Retrieval-based QA models.