Abstract
Indirect answers, crucial in human communication, serve to maintain politeness, avoid conflicts, and align with social customs. Although there has been a substantial number of studies on recognizing and understanding indirect answers to polar questions (often known as yes/no questions), there is a dearth of such work regarding wh-questions. This study takes up the challenge by constructing what is, to our knowledge, the first corpus of indirect answers to wh-questions. We analyze and interpret indirect answers to different wh-questions based on our carefully compiled corpus. In addition, we conducted a pilot study on generating indirect answers to wh-questions by fine-tuning the pre-trained generative language model DialoGPT (Zhang et al., 2020). Our results suggest this is a task that GPT finds difficult.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.sigdial-1.30
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Prague, Czechia
- Editors:
- Svetlana Stoyanchev, Shafiq Joty, David Schlangen, Ondrej Dusek, Casey Kennington, Malihe Alikhani
- Venue:
- SIGDIAL
- SIG:
- SIGDIAL
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 336–348
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.sigdial-1.30
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.sigdial-1.30
- Cite (ACL):
- Zulipiye Yusupujiang and Jonathan Ginzburg. 2023. Unravelling Indirect Answers to Wh-Questions: Corpus Construction, Analysis, and Generation. In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 336–348, Prague, Czechia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Unravelling Indirect Answers to Wh-Questions: Corpus Construction, Analysis, and Generation (Yusupujiang & Ginzburg, SIGDIAL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2023.sigdial-1.30.pdf