In this paper we present the Konstanz Resource of Questions (KRoQ), the first dependency-parsed, parallel multilingual corpus of information-seeking and non-information-seeking questions. In creating the corpus, we employ a linguistically motivated rule-based system that uses linguistic cues from one language to help classify and annotate questions across other languages. Our current corpus includes German, French, Spanish and Koine Greek. Based on the linguistically motivated heuristics we identify, a two-step scoring mechanism assigns intra- and inter-language scores to each question. Based on these scores, each question is classified as being either information seeking or non-information seeking. An evaluation shows that this mechanism correctly classifies questions in 79% of the cases. We release our corpus as a basis for further work in the area of question classification. It can be utilized as training and testing data for machine-learning algorithms, as corpus-data for theoretical linguistic questions or as a resource for further rule-based approaches to question identification.
@InProceedings{KALOULI18.13, author = {Aikaterini-Lida Kalouli and Katharina Kaiser and Annette Hautli-Janisz and Georg A. Kaiser and Miriam Butt}, title = "{A Multilingual Approach to Question Classification}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
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