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 summarization. In this paper, we explore the largely understudied problem of rhetorical question identification. Specifically, we present a simple n-gram based language model to classify rhetorical questions in the Switchboard Dialogue Act Corpus. We find that a special treatment of rhetorical questions which incorporates contextual information achieves the highest performance.