English

Identifying Well-formed Natural Language Questions

Computation and Language 2018-08-29 v1

Abstract

Understanding search queries is a hard problem as it involves dealing with "word salad" text ubiquitously issued by users. However, if a query resembles a well-formed question, a natural language processing pipeline is able to perform more accurate interpretation, thus reducing downstream compounding errors. Hence, identifying whether or not a query is well formed can enhance query understanding. Here, we introduce a new task of identifying a well-formed natural language question. We construct and release a dataset of 25,100 publicly available questions classified into well-formed and non-wellformed categories and report an accuracy of 70.7% on the test set. We also show that our classifier can be used to improve the performance of neural sequence-to-sequence models for generating questions for reading comprehension.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.09419,
  title  = {Identifying Well-formed Natural Language Questions},
  author = {Manaal Faruqui and Dipanjan Das},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.09419},
  year   = {2018}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T03:46:46.405Z