Classification of crop disease-pest questions based on BERT-BiGRU-CapsNet with attention pooling

Crop disease-pest question classification is an essential part of pest knowledge intelligent question answering system. A crop disease-pest question classification method is proposed on the basis of bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), bidirectional gated unit (BiGRU), capsule network (CapsNet), and BERT-BiGRU-CapsNet with attention pooling (BBGCAP). In BBGCAP, the unstructured text data are preprocessed vectorically using BERT, BiGRU is used to extract the deep features of the text, attention pooling is used to assign the corresponding weights to the extracted deep information, and CapsNet is used to route the right alternative. BBGCAP is a synthetic model by integrating the advantages of BERT, BiGRU, CapsNet, and attention pooling. The experimental results on the cucumber-pest question database show that the proposed method is superior to the methods based on traditional template matching, support vector machines (SVM), and convolutional neural network-long short-term memory (LSTM), and the accuracy rates of precision, recall, and F1 are all above 902.15%. This method provides technical support for intelligent question answering system of crop disease-pests.