Question Classification for Intelligent Question Answering: A Comprehensive Survey

In the era of GeoAI, Geospatial Intelligent Question Answering (GeoIQA) represents the ultimate pursuit for everyone. Even generative AI systems like ChatGPT-4 struggle to handle complex GeoIQA. GeoIQA is domain complex IQA, which aims at understanding and answering questions accurately. The core of IQA is the Question Classification (QC), which mainly contains four types: content-based, template-based, calculation-based and method-based classification. These IQA_QC frameworks, however, struggle to be compatible and integrate with each other, which may be the bottleneck restricting the substantial improvement of IQA performance. To address this problem, this paper reviewed recent advances on IQA with the focus on solving question classification and proposed a comprehensive IQA_QC framework for understanding user query intention more accurately. By introducing the basic idea of the IQA mechanism, a three-level question classification framework consisting of essence, form and implementation is put forward which could cover the complexity and diversity of geographical questions. In addition, the proposed IQA_QC framework revealed that there are still significant deficiencies in the IQA evaluation metrics in the aspect of broader dimensions, which led to low answer performance, functional performance and systematic performance. Through the comparisons, we find that the proposed IQA_QC framework can fully integrate and surpass the existing classification. Although our proposed classification can be further expanded and improved, we firmly believe that this comprehensive IQA_QC framework can effectively help researchers in both semantic parsing and question querying processes. Furthermore, the IQA_QC framework can also provide a systematic question-and-answer pair/library categorization system for AIGCs, such as GPT-4. In conclusion, whether it is explicit GeoAI or implicit GeoAI, the IQA_QC can play a pioneering role in providing question-and-answer types in the future.