Papers › What Are People Asking About COVID-19? A Question Classification Dataset

What Are People Asking About COVID-19? A Question Classification Dataset

26 May 2020ACL 2020 7arXiv:2005.12522archive 2025-07-28

Jerry Wei, Chengyu Huang, Soroush Vosoughi, Jason Wei

We present COVID-Q, a set of 1,690 questions about COVID-19 from 13 sources, which we annotate into 15 question categories and 207 question clusters. The most common questions in our dataset asked about transmission, prevention, and societal effects of COVID, and we found that many questions that appeared in multiple sources were not answered by any FAQ websites of reputable organizations such as the CDC and FDA. We post our dataset publicly at https://github.com/JerryWeiAI/COVID-Q. For classifying questions into 15 categories, a BERT baseline scored 58.1% accuracy when trained on 20 examples per category, and for a question clustering task, a BERT + triplet loss baseline achieved 49.5% accuracy. We hope COVID-Q can help either for direct use in developing applied systems or as a domain-specific resource for model evaluation.

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ClusteringGeneral Classification

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COVID-Q

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AdamAttentionAttention DropoutBERTDense ConnectionsDropoutLayer NormalizationLinear LayerLinear Warmup With Linear DecayMulti-Head AttentionResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTriplet LossWeight DecayWordPiece

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