Abstract: Prior work has demonstrated that question classification (QC), recognizing the problem domain of a question, can help answer it more accurately. However, developing strong QC algorithms has been hindered by the limited size and complexity of annotated data available. To address this, we present the largest challenge dataset for QC, containing 7,787 science exam questions paired with detailed classification labels from a fine-grained hierarchical taxonomy of 406 problem domains. We then show that a BERT-based model trained on this dataset achieves a large (+0.12 MAP) gain compared with previous methods, while also achieving state-of-the-art performance on benchmark open-domain and biomedical QC datasets. Finally, we show that using this model's predictions of question topic significantly improves the accuracy of a question answering system by +1.7% P@1, with substantial future gains possible as QC performance improves.

Introduction: Understanding what a question is asking is one of the first steps that humans use to work towards an answer. In the context of question answering, question classification allows automated systems to intelligently target their inference systems to domain-specific solvers capable of addressing specific kinds of questions and problem solving methods with high confidence and answer accuracy BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 . To date, question classification has primarily been studied in the context of open-domain TREC questions BIBREF2 , with smaller recent datasets available in the biomedical BIBREF3 , BIBREF4 and education BIBREF5 domains. The open-domain TREC question corpus is a set of 5,952 short factoid questions paired with a taxonomy developed by Li and Roth BIBREF6 that includes 6 coarse answer types (such as entities, locations, and numbers), and 50 fine-grained types (e.g. specific kinds of entities, such as animals or vehicles). While a wide variety of syntactic, semantic, and other features and classification methods have been applied to this task, culminating in near-perfect classification performance BIBREF7 , recent work has demonstrated that QC methods developed on TREC questions generally fail to transfer to datasets with more complex questions such as those in the biomedical domain BIBREF3 , likely due in part to the simplicity and syntactic regularity of the questions, and the ability for simpler term-frequency models to achieve near-ceiling performance BIBREF8 . In this work we explore question classification in the context of multiple choice science exams. Standardized science exams have been proposed as a challenge task for question answering BIBREF9 , as most questions contain a variety of challenging inference problems BIBREF10 , BIBREF11 , require detailed scientific and common-sense knowledge to answer and explain the reasoning behind those answers BIBREF12 , and questions are often embedded in complex examples or other distractors. Question classification taxonomies and annotation are difficult and expensive to generate, and because of the unavailability of this data, to date most models for science questions use one or a small number of generic solvers that perform little or no question decomposition BIBREF13 , BIBREF14 , BIBREF15 , BIBREF16 , BIBREF17 . Our long-term interest is in developing methods that intelligently target their inferences to generate both correct answers and compelling human-readable explanations for the reasoning behind those answers. The lack of targeted solving – using the same methods for inferring answers to spatial questions about planetary motion, chemical questions about photosynthesis, and electrical questions about circuit continuity – is a substantial barrier to increasing performance (see Figure FIGREF1 ). To address this need for developing methods of targetted inference, this work makes the following contributions:

Question: How was the dataset collected?
Answer: Used from  science exam questions of the Aristo Reasoning Challenge (ARC) corpus.