Question Type Prediction in Natural Debate

Zlata Kikteva, Alexander Trautsch, Steffen Herbold, Annette Hautli-Janisz


Abstract
In spontaneous natural debate, questions play a variety of crucial roles: they allow speakers to introduce new topics, seek other speakers’ opinions or indeed confront them. A three-class question typology has previously been demonstrated to effectively capture details pertaining to the nature of questions and the different functions associated with them in a debate setting. We adopt this classification and investigate the performance of several machine learning approaches on this task by incorporating various sets of lexical, dialogical and argumentative features. We find that BERT demonstrates the best performance on the task, followed by a Random Forest model enriched with pragmatic features.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigdial-1.53
Volume:
Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2024
Address:
Kyoto, Japan
Editors:
Tatsuya Kawahara, Vera Demberg, Stefan Ultes, Koji Inoue, Shikib Mehri, David Howcroft, Kazunori Komatani
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
624–630
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.53
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zlata Kikteva, Alexander Trautsch, Steffen Herbold, and Annette Hautli-Janisz. 2024. Question Type Prediction in Natural Debate. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 624–630, Kyoto, Japan. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Question Type Prediction in Natural Debate (Kikteva et al., SIGDIAL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigdial-1.53.pdf