Fermi at SemEval-2019 Task 8: An elementary but effective approach to Question Discernment in Community QA Forums

Online Community Question Answering Forums (cQA) have gained massive popularity within recent years. The rise in users for such forums have led to the increase in the need for automated evaluation for question comprehension and fact evaluation of the answers provided by various participants in the forum. Our team, \textbf{Fermi}, participated in sub-task A of Task 8 at SemEval 2019 - which tackles the first problem in the pipeline of factual evaluation in cQA forums, i.e., deciding whether a posed question asks for a factual information, an opinion/advice or is just socializing. This information is highly useful in segregating factual questions from non-factual ones which highly helps in organizing the questions into useful categories and trims down the problem space for the next task in the pipeline for fact evaluation among the available answers. Our system uses the embeddings obtained from Universal Sentence Encoder combined with XGBoost for the classification sub-task A. We also evaluate other combinations of embeddings and off-the-shelf machine learning algorithms to demonstrate the efficacy of the various representations and their combinations. Our results across the evaluation test set gave an accuracy of 84{\%} and received the first position in the final standings judged by the organizers.