Question Classification of University Admission using Named-Entity Recognition (NER)

The university admission process can be overwhelming for applicants and admission officers, with many questions being asked and answered every year. The manual classification of these questions can be time-consuming and may lead to errors, making exploring automated solutions to this problem essential. In recent years, advances in natural language processing (NLP), including question classification. The research proposes an architecture for a question classification system using the Indonesian Language in closed-domain question answering. The purpose of this research is to find out the classification of questions. We created a system with the Named-Entity Recognition method to recognize the next word that will be used as a candidate type of question and candidate answer. The type of question used is a factoid question. Research makes patterns and rules for extracting important words as features to determine the taxonomy of question classification. Datasets are collected from one private university in Indonesia. Data sources from Binus Online Learning websites and data on questions frequently asked by users, especially prospective students. The results of the question classification are presented using descriptive statistics. The results show that the question classification with users’ most frequent question type is “What” by 63.3%, and the answer category is “tuition fees” by 22.4%. It can be concluded that the most frequent question type asked by users is “What”, and the most frequent topic of interest is “tuition fees”. Organizations can use this information to improve customer service by providing more relevant information and resources about tuition fees.