@InProceedings{zhang-spirling-danescuniculescumizil:2017:EMNLP2017,
  author    = {Zhang, Justine  and  Spirling, Arthur  and  Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Cristian},
  title     = {Asking too much? The rhetorical role of questions in political discourse},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  month     = {September},
  year      = {2017},
  address   = {Copenhagen, Denmark},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {1558--1572},
  abstract  = {Questions play a prominent role in social interactions, performing rhetorical
	functions that go beyond that of simple informational exchange.  The surface
	form of a question can signal the intention and background of the person asking
	it, as well as the nature of their relation with the interlocutor.  While the
	informational nature of questions has been extensively examined in the context
	of question-answering applications, their rhetorical aspects have been largely
	understudied.
	In this work we introduce an unsupervised methodology for extracting surface
	motifs that recur in questions, and for grouping them according to their latent
	rhetorical role.  By applying this framework to the setting of question
	sessions in the UK parliament, we show that the resulting typology encodes key
	aspects of the political discourse---such as the bifurcation in questioning
	behavior between government and opposition parties---and reveals new insights
	into the effects of a legislator's tenure and political career ambitions.},
  url       = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/D17-1164}
}