Research Journal of Engineering and Technology

Question classification is very important for question answering. This paper presents our research work on question classification through machine learning approaches. We have experimented with three machine learning algorithms: Nearest Neighbors (NN), Naïve Bayes (NB), and Support Vector Machines (SVM) using two kinds of features: bagof-words and bag-of n grams. The experiment results show that with only surface text features the SVM outperforms the other four methods for this task. Further, we propose to use a lexico-syntactic combined feature of question classification.