CogQTaxo: Modeling human cognitive process with a three-dimensional question taxonomy

In question answering systems, question taxonomy is commonly used as the representation of user information needs. This paper proposes CogQTaxo, a framework of three-dimensional question taxonomy. The dimensions represent the surface information need, the implicit information needs and the pragmatic expectations respectively. The employed linguistic classification criteria follow the cognitive process of human question interpretation. A case study of the information needs of users new to a restricted domain is conducted. Inter-annotation agreement and machine learning classification experiments show that users under the same context have similar and predictable information needs in all the three dimensions and that dependency relations exist between information needs of different dimensions.