HAEE: Question Classification Using Hierarchical Intra-Attention Enhancement Encoder

With the development of E-commerce, an Automated Question-Answering system takes a crucial part in customer service. Question classification, which assigns labels to questions according to the answer types, is one of the tasks in question answering. Previous methods usually used handcraft features like named entity recognition, but it needs the predefined dictionary or tools. The machine learning approaches are recently applied to this task and achieve high accuracy. In this paper, we proposed HAEE, a Hierarchical intra-Attention Enhancement Encoder which composed of bidirectional GRUs and intra-attentions. In addition, we adopt the character input to address the issue of the OOV (Out-Of-Vocabulary) problem and create multiple intra-attentions to simulate the certain relationships between characters (Chinese) or words (English) to enhance the influence of tokens on the sentence. We evaluate the HAEE model in an actual corporate setting and several datasets. As shown in the experimental results, our HAEE model outperforms the existing state-of-the-art models on question classification tasks, especially for the Chinese corpus.