QAAN: Question Answering Attention Network for Community Question Classification

Community Question Answering (CQA) provides platforms for users with various backgrounds to obtain information and share knowledge. In recent years, with the rapid development of such online platforms, an enormous amount of archive data has accumulated, it becomes more and more difficult for expert users to identify desirable questions. In order to reduce the proportion of unanswered questions in CQA, facilitate expert users to find the questions they are interested in, question classification becomes an important task of CQA, which aims to assign a newly posted question to a specific preset category. In this paper, we propose a novel question answering attention network (QAAN) for investigating the role of the paired answer of questions for classification. Specifically, QAAN studies the correlation between question and paired answer, taking the questions as the primary part of the question representation, and the answer information is aggregated based on similarity and disparity with the answer. Our experiment is implemented on Yahoo! Answers dataset. The results show that QAAN outperforms all the baseline models.