Exploring the Role of Context to Distinguish Rhetorical and Information-Seeking Questions

Yuan Zhuang, Ellen Riloff


Abstract
Social media posts often contain questions, but many of the questions are rhetorical and do not seek information. Our work studies the problem of distinguishing rhetorical and information-seeking questions on Twitter. Most work has focused on features of the question itself, but we hypothesize that the prior context plays a role too. This paper introduces a new dataset containing questions in tweets paired with their prior tweets to provide context. We create classification models to assess the difficulty of distinguishing rhetorical and information-seeking questions, and experiment with different properties of the prior context. Our results show that the prior tweet and topic features can improve performance on this task.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-srw.41
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Shruti Rijhwani, Jiangming Liu, Yizhong Wang, Rotem Dror
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
306–312
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-srw.41
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-srw.41
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuan Zhuang and Ellen Riloff. 2020. Exploring the Role of Context to Distinguish Rhetorical and Information-Seeking Questions. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop, pages 306–312, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Exploring the Role of Context to Distinguish Rhetorical and Information-Seeking Questions (Zhuang & Riloff, ACL 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-srw.41.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928672