Question identification on twitter

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the novel problem of automatic question identification in the microblog environment. It contains two steps: detecting tweets that contain questions (we call them "interrogative tweets") and extracting the tweets which really seek information or ask for help (so called "qweets") from interrogative tweets. To detect interrogative tweets, both traditional rule-based approach and state-of-the-art learning-based method are employed. To extract qweets, context features like short urls and Tweet-specific features like Retweets are elaborately selected for classification. We conduct an empirical study with sampled one hour's English tweets and report our experimental results for question identification on Twitter.