Rhetorical Questions and Ruminations

Automatic Identification of Rhetorical Questions

A question may be asked not only to elicit information, but also to make a statement. Questions serving the latter purpose, called rhetorical questions, are often lexically and syntactically indistinguishable from other types of questions. Still, it is desirable to be able to identify rhetorical questions, as it is relevant for many NLP tasks, including information extraction and text summariza...

Intentions, Information, And Inference: Two Rhetorical Questions

The rhetorical attachment of questions and answers

Placing ourselves within the tradition of dynamic semantic approaches to discourse in natural language Kamp and Reyle (1993), Groenendjik and Stokhof (1991), we investigate here how some of the principles underlying these approaches can be extended to the study of human dialogue, taking over some hypotheses of Asher and Lascarides (1998, 2003). In this perspective, a dialogue is made of segment...

Identifying Rhetorical Questions in Social Media

Social media provides a platform for seeking information from a large user base. Information seeking in social media, however, occurs simultaneously with users expressing their viewpoints by making statements. Rhetorical questions have the form of a question but serve the function of a statement and might mislead platforms assisting information seeking in social media. It becomes difficult to i...

Answering Questions about Questions: A Persuasion Knowledge Perspective for Understanding the Effects of Rhetorical Questions

Past research is not clear on the process by which rhetorical questions influence persuasion (i.e., increased focus on message arguments vs. on the persuasion agent). Based on recent theories of persuasion knowledge and rhetorical figures in advertising, our model delineates conditions under which rhetoricals are likely to enhance argument elaboration (low salience of the rhetorical) and those ...