Are you serious?: Rhetorical Questions and Sarcasm in Social Media Dialog

What it is about

Rhetorical questions (questions not meant to get an answer) are collected with an intent-based heuristic: a question in the middle of a turn that the same speaker answers at once, without giving up the turn. This yields 10,270 rhetorical questions from debate forums (Internet Argument Corpus) and Twitter. An SVM on word embeddings separates them from sincere information-seeking questions at 0.76 F1. Rhetorical questions are then classified as sarcastic or other (argumentative structuring in forums; attention-grabbing and calls to action in tweets): adding LIWC category features lifts forum results to 0.76/0.77 F1, an LSTM is sensitive to how much context is given (the sarcasm is often sharpened by the remark after the question), and tweets are easier (higher scores). The paper also recalls linguistic cues from earlier work: after all at the start and strong negative polarity items (lift a finger, budge an inch) mark rhetorical questions, by any chance marks sincere ones.

Ideas

• I1. Implement the self-answer heuristic in the frame reader: a quoted question followed, inside the same quote and by the same speaker, by a statement that answers it («Who will help me? Nobody!») is rhetorical; its act is the act of the answer (assert, evaluate, disagree), not ask, and indirect=1. A rule in prag/src/agree.rs or the Say-frame code of prag/src/frames.rs; measure on silver lines with form=q|wh and act ≠ ask (the teacher already marks many such lines).
• I2. Add the closed cue lists: rhetorical cues (after all, who cares, what's the use, strong NPIs such as lift a finger, budge an inch, give a damn) and sincere-question cues (by any chance, do you happen to) to prag/data/cues.tsv as a rq slot. Count coverage and precision against the silver acts.
• I3. A rhetorical question should not open a question on Mova's QUD stack (world/src/qud.rs): mark it answered by its own speaker, so the next sentences are not forced to attach to it. Test with a story fragment with and without the self-answer.

For Mova

34. Irony and figurative language §6 (rhetorical questions), 26-questions.md, 31-speech-acts.md §5. Code: prag/src/frames.rs, prag/src/agree.rs, prag/data/cues.tsv, world/src/qud.rs. Measures: act accuracy on question-form lines in prag eval; QUD stack tests.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/w17-5537 · arXiv 1709.05305

@inproceedings{oraby2017are,
  title = {{Are you serious?: Rhetorical Questions and Sarcasm in Social Media Dialog}},
  author = {Oraby, Shereen and Harrison, Vrindavan and Misra, Amita and Riloff, Ellen and Walker, Marilyn},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue},
  year = {2017},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/w17-5537},
  eprint = {1709.05305},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w17-5537}
}

References

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