Determine if a sentence is an inquiry

Question

How can I detect if a search query is in the form of a question?

For example, a customer might search for "how do I track my order" (notice no question mark).

I'm guessing most direct questions would conform to a particular grammar.

Very simple guessing approach:

START WORDS = [who, what, when, where, why, how, is, can, does, do]  isQuestion(sentence):   sentence ends with '?'   OR sentence starts with one of START WORDS 

START WORDS list could be longer. The scope is a website search box, so I imagine the list shouldn't need to include too many words.

Is there a library that can do this better than my simple guessing approach? Any improvements on my approach?

Answer 1

See also: How to find out if a sentence is a question (interrogative)?

My answer from that question:

In a syntactic parse of a question (obtained through a toolkit like nltk), the correct structure will be in the form of:

(SBARQ (WH+ (W+) ...)        (SQ ...*            (V+) ...*)        (?)) 

So, using anyone of the syntactic parsers available, a tree with an SBARQ node having an embedded SQ (optionally) will be an indicator the input is a question. The WH+ node (WHNP/WHADVP/WHADJP) contains the question stem (who/what/when/where/why/how) and the SQ holds the inverted phrase.

i.e.:

(SBARQ    (WHNP      (WP What))    (SQ      (VBZ is)      (NP        (DT the)        (NN question)))   (. ?)) 

Of course, having a lot of preceeding clauses will cause errors in the parse (that can be worked around), as will really poorly-written questions. For example, the title of this post "How to find out if a sentence is a question?" will have an SBARQ, but not an SQ.

Answer 2

You are going to need a much more advanced form of linguistic analysis to pull this off. Need Proof? Okay...

Does are female deer.

Where there is a will, there is a way.

When the time comes, I'll jump!

Why no. I do not have any pumpernickel.