Querent Intent in Multi-Sentence Questions

Laurie Burchell, Jie Chi, Tom Hosking, Nina Markl, Bonnie Webber


Abstract
Multi-sentence questions (MSQs) are sequences of questions connected by relations which, unlike sequences of standalone questions, need to be answered as a unit. Following Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), we recognise that different “question discourse relations” between the subparts of MSQs reflect different speaker intents, and consequently elicit different answering strategies. Correctly identifying these relations is therefore a crucial step in automatically answering MSQs. We identify five different types of MSQs in English, and define five novel relations to describe them. We extract over 162,000 MSQs from Stack Exchange to enable future research. Finally, we implement a high-precision baseline classifier based on surface features.
Anthology ID:
2020.law-1.13
Volume:
Proceedings of the 14th Linguistic Annotation Workshop
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain
Editors:
Stefanie Dipper, Amir Zeldes
Venue:
LAW
SIG:
SIGANN
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
138–147
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.law-1.13
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Laurie Burchell, Jie Chi, Tom Hosking, Nina Markl, and Bonnie Webber. 2020. Querent Intent in Multi-Sentence Questions. In Proceedings of the 14th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pages 138–147, Barcelona, Spain. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Querent Intent in Multi-Sentence Questions (Burchell et al., LAW 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.law-1.13.pdf
Code
 laurieburchell/multi-sentence-questions