@InProceedings{oraby-EtAl:2017:W17-55,
  author    = {Oraby, Shereen  and  Harrison, Vrindavan  and  Misra, Amita  and  Riloff, Ellen  and  Walker, Marilyn},
  title     = {Are you serious?: Rhetorical Questions and Sarcasm in Social Media Dialog},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue},
  month     = {August},
  year      = {2017},
  address   = {Saarbrücken, Germany},
  publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics},
  pages     = {310--319},
  abstract  = {Effective models of social dialog must understand a broad range of
	rhetorical and figurative devices. Rhetorical questions (RQs)
	are a type of figurative language whose aim is to achieve a pragmatic
	goal, such as structuring an argument, being persuasive, emphasizing a point, 
	or being ironic. While there are computational models for other forms of
	figurative language, rhetorical questions have received little
	attention to date.  We expand a small dataset from previous work, presenting a
	corpus of 10,270 RQs from debate forums and Twitter that represent different
	discourse functions. We show that we can clearly distinguish between RQs and
	sincere questions (0.76 F1). We then show that RQs can be used both
	sarcastically and non-sarcastically, observing that non-sarcastic (other) uses
	of RQs are frequently argumentative in forums, and persuasive in tweets. We
	present experiments to distinguish between these uses of RQs using SVM and LSTM
	models that represent linguistic features and post-level context, achieving
	results as high as 0.76 F1 for "sarcastic" and 0.77 F1 for "other" in forums,
	and 0.83 F1 for both "sarcastic" and "other" in tweets. We supplement our
	quantitative experiments with an in-depth characterization of the linguistic
	variation in RQs.},
  url       = {http://aclweb.org/anthology/W17-5537}
}