Rhetorical questions, relevance and scales

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...

Relevance and Questions

Notice that this analysis – just like Groenendijk & Stokhof’s one – predicts wh-questions to have a mention-all reading only. To account for mention-some readings it is then normally assumed that wh-questions are, in fact, ambiguous between those two readings of questions, and that the appropriate reading is then selected by pragmatic criteria (as in van Rooy, to appear). In this note, however,...

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...