Question Analysis towards a Vietnamese Question Answering System in the Education Domain

Building a computer system, which can automatically answer questions in the human language, speech or text, is a long-standing goal of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) field. Question analysis, the task of extracting important information from the input question, is the first and crucial step towards a question answering system. In this paper, we focus on the task of Vietnamese question analysis in the education domain. Our goal is to extract important information expressed by named entities in an input question, such as university names, campus names, major names, and teacher names. We present several extraction models that utilize the advantages of both traditional statistical methods with handcrafted features and more recent advanced deep neural networks with automatically learned features. Our best model achieves 88.11% in the F₁ score on a corpus consisting of 3,600 Vietnamese questions collected from the fan page of the International School, Vietnam National University, Hanoi.