Table of Contents
Description
Summary and intended uses
Model to detect whether a sentence is a question.
For example
- Question: How are you
- Question: Hello there, how are you
- Other: Hello there, nice to meet you
- Other: The highest mountain of Switzerland is the Dufourspitze
- Question: Which ANN algorithm has Apache Lucene implemented
- Other: Hi Everyone, we have a new blog post that you all might be interested in: "Why is Vector Search so fast?"
The model can be used by bots (e.g. https://ukatie.com) to detect questions inside chatrooms, like for example Slack, MS Teams, Discord or Matrix.
Languages
So far, English is the only supported language.
Dataset Structure
Data Fields
Text: Short input sentence, e.g. "Which ANN algorithm has Apache Lucene implemented"
Label: Question or Other
Data Splits
Question: 10K samples
Other: 10K samples
Training: 18K samples shuffled
Validation: 2K samples shuffled
Dataset Creation
Curation Rationale
Simple, short and basic language examples were chosen, because those contain the same kind of words and word placements as long-winded questions with rare words.
Also the goal of this is to detect questions in a chatroom, which is a medium where people often use very short sentences and a lot of greetings or small-talk.
Source Data
Initial Data Collection
https://github.com/zeloru/small-english-smalltalk-corpus
It is scraped data from ESL language learning material.
Out of the already scraped data, only samples from certain conversations were taken, because of quality issues with some of them.
Because we also want to detect questions that are missing a questionmark, most of the samples had the questionmark removed. The same was done for the "other" label where "." were removed from the end of a sentence. This was done, so these identifiers don't become the only feature the model looks at.
Annotations
Annotation process
The annotations of "question" or "other" were done automatically by taking questions in the conversations as "question" and the answers as "other"
Considerations for Using the Model
Known Limitations
There seems to be an inbalance of greeting word combinations in the beginning of sentences, for example "Hi, has anyone deployed X in Y" is falsely not detected as a question because of the "Hi, " part. This issue will be addressed in updates.
Sentences in the form of "Wondering if 'question'..." and "I'm asking for help about 'question'..." are seemingly hard to detect and need more samples in the data.
Code fragments in input sentences are sometimes detected as questions. If code is present, it should probably be filtered out beforehand.