@inproceedings{muller-plank-2024-indirectqa,
    title = "{I}ndirect{QA}: Understanding Indirect Answers to Implicit Polar Questions in {F}rench and {S}panish",
    author = {M{\"u}ller, Christin  and
      Plank, Barbara},
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.791",
    pages = "9025--9035",
    abstract = "Polar questions are common in dialogue and expect exactly one of two answers (yes/no). It is however not uncommon for speakers to bypass these expected choices and answer, for example, {``}Islands are generally by the sea{''} to the question: {``}An island? By the sea?{''}. While such answers are natural in spoken dialogues, conversational systems still struggle to interpret them. Seminal work to interpret indirect answers were made in recent years{---}but only for English and with strict question formulations. In this work, we present a new corpus for French and Spanish{---}IndirectQA {---}where we mine subtitle data for indirect answers to study the labeling task with six different labels, while broadening polar questions to include also implicit polar questions (statements that trigger a yes/no-answer which are not necessarily formulated as a question). We opted for subtitles since they are a readily available source of conversation in various languages, but also come with peculiarities and challenges which we will discuss. Overall, we provide the first results on French and Spanish. They show that the task is challenging: the baseline accuracy scores drop from 61.43 on English to 44.06 for French and Spanish.",
}

Polar questions are common in dialogue and expect exactly one of two answers (yes/no). It is however not uncommon for speakers to bypass these expected choices and answer, for example, {``}Islands are generally by the sea{''} to the question: {``}An island? By the sea?{''}. While such answers are natural in spoken dialogues, conversational systems still struggle to interpret them. Seminal work to interpret indirect answers were made in recent years{---}but only for English and with strict question formulations. In this work, we present a new corpus for French and Spanish{---}IndirectQA {---}where we mine subtitle data for indirect answers to study the labeling task with six different labels, while broadening polar questions to include also implicit polar questions (statements that trigger a yes/no-answer which are not necessarily formulated as a question). We opted for subtitles since they are a readily available source of conversation in various languages, but also come with peculiarities and challenges which we will discuss. Overall, we provide the first results on French and Spanish. They show that the task is challenging: the baseline accuracy scores drop from 61.43 on English to 44.06 for French and Spanish.
M{\"u}ller, Christin Plank, Barbara
IndirectQA: Understanding Indirect Answers to Implicit Polar Questions in French and Spanish