Multi-Task Learning Model for Kazakh Query Understanding

Query understanding (QU) plays a vital role in natural language processing, particularly in regard to question answering and dialogue systems. QU finds the named entity and query intent in users’ questions. Traditional pipeline approaches manage the two mentioned tasks, namely, the named entity recognition (NER) and the question classification (QC), separately. NER is seen as a sequence labeling task to predict a keyword, while QC is a semantic classification task to predict the user’s intent. Considering the correlation between these two tasks, training them together could be of benefit to both of them. Kazakh is a low-resource language with wealthy lexical and agglutinative characteristics. We argue that current QU techniques restrict the power of the word-level and sentence-level features of agglutinative languages, especially the stem, suffixes, POS, and gazetteers. This paper proposes a new multi-task learning model for query understanding (MTQU). The MTQU model is designed to establish direct connections for QC and NER tasks to help them promote each other mutually, while we also designed a multi-feature input layer that significantly influenced the model’s performance during training. In addition, we constructed new corpora for the Kazakh query understanding task, namely, the KQU. As a result, the MTQU model is simple and effective and obtains competitive results for the KQU.