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.
One useful way to find the answer to a question is to search a library of previously-answered questions. This is the idea behind FAQFinder, a Web-based natural language questionanswering system which uses Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) files to answer users’ questions. FAQFinder tries to answer a user’s question by retrieving a similar FAQ question, if one exists, and its answer. FAQFinder uses several metrics to judge the similarity of user and FAQ questions. In this paper, we discuss a metric based on question type, which we recently added to the system. We discuss the taxonomy of question types used, and present experimental results which indicate that the incorporation of question type information has substantially improved FAQFinder’s performance. Abstract : This labeling guide is adapted from work on the Switchboard recordings and the accompanying manual ( 1997). The Switchboard-DAMSL (SWBD-DAMSL) manual for labeling one-on-one phone conversations provided a useful starting point for the types of dialog acts (DAs) that arose in the ICSI meeting corpus. However, the tagset for labeling meetings presented here has been modified as necessary to better reflect the types of interaction we observed in multiparty face-to-face meetings. This guide consists of five major sections: Quick Reference Information, Segmentation, How to Label, Adjacency Pairs, and Tag Descriptions. The first section supplies definitions for terms used throughout this guide and contains the correspondence of the Meeting Recorder DA (MRDA) tagset, which is the tagset detailed within this guide, to the SWBD-DAMSL tagset. This section also contains the entire MRDA tagset organized into groups according to syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and functional similarities of the utterances they mark. The section entitled Segmentation, as its name indicates, details the rules and guidelines governing what constitutes an utterance along with how to determine utterance boundaries. The third section, How to Label, provides instruction regarding label construction, the management of utterances requiring additional DAs or containing quotes, and the use of the annotation software. The section entitled Adjacency Pairs details how adjacency pairs are constructed and the rules governing their usage. The section entitled Tag Descriptions provides explanations of each tag within the MRDA tagset. Two appendices are also found within this guide. The first provides a labeled portion of a meeting and the second contains information regarding tags used for a select number of meetings.