Understanding search queries is a hard problem as it involves dealing with "word salad" text ubiquitously issued by users. However, if a query resembles a well-formed question, a natural language processing pipeline is able to perform more accurate interpretation, thus reducing downstream compounding errors. Hence, identifying whether or not a query is well formed can enhance query understanding. Here, we introduce a new task of identifying a well-formed natural language question. We construct and release a dataset of 25,100 publicly available questions classified into well-formed and non-wellformed categories and report an accuracy of 70.7 on the test set. We also show that our classifier can be used to improve the performance of neural sequence-to-sequence models for generating questions for reading comprehension.
@cite_15: We demonstrate that an attention-based encoder-decoder model can be used for sentence-level grammatical error identification for the Automated Evaluation of Scientific Writing (AESW) Shared Task 2016. The attention-based encoder-decoder models can be used for the generation of corrections, in addition to error identification, which is of interest for certain end-user applications. We show that a character-based encoder-decoder model is particularly effective, outperforming other results on the AESW Shared Task on its own, and showing gains over a word-based counterpart. Our final model--a combination of three character-based encoder-decoder models, one word-based encoder-decoder model, and a sentence-level CNN--is the highest performing system on the AESW 2016 binary prediction Shared Task.
@cite_10: The CoNLL-2014 shared task was devoted to grammatical error correction of all error types. In this paper, we give the task definition, present the data sets, and describe the evaluation metric and scorer used in the shared task. We also give an overview of the various approaches adopted by the participating teams, and present the evaluation results. Compared to the CoNLL2013 shared task, we have introduced the following changes in CoNLL-2014: (1) A participating system is expected to detect and correct grammatical errors of all types, instead of just the five error types in CoNLL-2013; (2) The evaluation metric was changed from F1 to F0.5, to emphasize precision over recall; and (3) We have two human annotators who independently annotated the test essays, compared to just one human annotator in CoNLL-2013.
@cite_12: 
We have referenced much of the related work throughout the paper. We now review another orthogonally related field of work. Grammatical error correction (GEC) is the task of correcting the grammatical errors (if any) in a piece of text @cite_10 . As GEC includes not just identification of ungrammatical text but also correcting the text to produce grammatical text, its a more complex task. However, grammatical error prediction @cite_15 @cite_12 is the task of classifying whether or not a sentence is grammatical, which is more closely related to our task as classifying a question as well-formed requires making judgement on both the style and grammar of the text.