@inproceedings{zhuang-riloff-2020-exploring,
    title = "Exploring the Role of Context to Distinguish Rhetorical and Information-Seeking Questions",
    author = "Zhuang, Yuan  and
      Riloff, Ellen",
    editor = "Rijhwani, Shruti  and
      Liu, Jiangming  and
      Wang, Yizhong  and
      Dror, Rotem",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Student Research Workshop",
    month = jul,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Online",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2020.acl-srw.41/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2020.acl-srw.41",
    pages = "306--312",
    abstract = "Social media posts often contain questions, but many of the questions are rhetorical and do not seek information. Our work studies the problem of distinguishing rhetorical and information-seeking questions on Twitter. Most work has focused on features of the question itself, but we hypothesize that the prior context plays a role too. This paper introduces a new dataset containing questions in tweets paired with their prior tweets to provide context. We create classification models to assess the difficulty of distinguishing rhetorical and information-seeking questions, and experiment with different properties of the prior context. Our results show that the prior tweet and topic features can improve performance on this task."
}