Statistical Machine Translation Improves Question Retrieval in Community Question Answering via Matrix Factorization

Guangyou Zhou, Fang Liu, Yang Liu, Shizhu He and Jun Zhao

The 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2013)
Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9, 2013

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Abstract

Community question answering (CQA) has become an increasingly popular re- search topic. In this paper, we focus on the problem of question retrieval. Question retrieval in CQA can automatically find the most relevant and recent questions that have been solved by other users. However, the word ambiguity and word mismatch problems bring about new challenges for question retrieval in CQA. State-of-the-art approaches address these issues by implic- itly expanding the queried questions with additional words or phrases using mono- lingual translation models. While use- ful, the effectiveness of these models is highly dependent on the availability of quality parallel monolingual corpora (e.g., question-answer pairs) in the absence of which they are troubled by noise issue. In this work, we propose an alternative way to address the word ambiguity and word mismatch problems by taking advan- tage of potentially rich semantic informa- tion drawn from other languages. Our pro- posed method employs statistical machine translation to improve question retrieval and enriches the question representation with the translated words from other lan- guages via matrix factorization. Experi- ments conducted on a real CQA data show that our proposed approach is promising.

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