Information-seeking Questions Research Articles

Pragmatic effects on the sentence-final intonation of answered wh-in-situ questions in French

Abstract The final intonation in French wh-in-situ questions is subject to much debate. Although a wide variety of final pitch movements has been observed, recent studies generally agree on a tendency for final rises. In our study, we analysed the answered wh-in-situ questions (e.g. Tu veux savoir quoi ? – Tout ! ‘What do you want to know? – Everything!’) in a corpus of eleven audio books. For our analysis, we used perceptual classifications by three annotators. Annotations included not only the perception of final intonational movement (‘rise’/‘fall’/‘plateau’), but also string-related (wh-lexeme; ‘wh-word final’/‘wh-word non-final’) and pragmatic (‘information-seeking’/‘non-information-seeking’; ‘hierarchical’/‘non-hierarchical’) features. Our results show that a) even string-identical wh-in-situ questions can be pronounced with rises as well as falls and b) pragmatics affect the final pitch movement. If the speaker is hierarchically superior to the hearer, rises are less likely, and questions that are answered by the same speaker are even associated with a non-rising default. However, our data also suggest that pragmatic functions cannot be directly mapped to pitch movement. Information-seeking questions can be pronounced with all three final intonations and speakers may even choose opposite patterns for the same interrogative in the same context.

Irrealis-marked interrogatives as rhetorical questions

AbstractI describe and compare two strategies to form rhetorical questions (RQs) in Sm’algyax (Tsimshianic). I show that one kind is isomorphic to ordinary, information-seeking questions, and is compatible with positive and negative answers, while the second is marked with irrealis morphology and only allows negative answers. I provide evidence from answerability and embedding to suggest that both types of RQs in Sm’algyax behave like questions in terms of their syntax/semantics, and propose that the irrealis subordinator present in the second type signals to the addressee that a negative answer is expected. These findings have implications for the presence of irrealis and subjunctive morphology appearing in RQs crosslinguistically.

‘뭘’: 문법화 양상과 놀람/불만-의문문의 의미해석

This paper investigates mwe-l ‘what’ questions in Korean. As a starting point, we collect mwe-l question sentences from Wulimal Saym (Our Speech Spring). In examining them, we note that on top of its use as an interjection, it can also be used as a questioning word, corresponding to what in English but interpreted as why. We argue that it has developed from mwe-(lo) (because of what) where -(u)lo is a particle expressing reason or cause. Crucially, the lateral -l is inserted between mwe-l and the particle for the sake of phonetic articulation. We move on to note that in Korean both mwe-l and mwue/mwe construct rhetorical-like surprise/disapproval questions. Following Caponigro and Sprouse’s (2007) and Celle’s (2018) pragmatic characterization of rhetorical- like surprise/disapproval questions in general, we show these constructions at issue are not only interpreted as information-seeking ordinary questions but also as expressing a speaker’s surprise and disapproval because of his/her expectation conflicting with the described state-of-affairs.

The prosody of surprise questions in Estonian

This paper examines the role of prosody in a little-studied type of non-canonical questions: syntactically and lexically canonical interrogative sentences that have been uttered by the speaker in order to express surprise. The study compares Estonian surprise questions with string-identical information-seeking questions elicited by means of context descriptions. The materials comprise 1,008 utterances by 21 speakers.It is concluded that the prosody of the examined utterances has three roles that are relevant to the expression of surprise by ordinary interrogative sentences. First, the enhanced prosodic realisation of the utterances as manifested in a longer duration, a wider pitch range, and a more frequent occurrence of upstepped pitch accents conveys emotional expressivity. Second, lower pitch along with the creaky voice quality signals that the utterances are not canonical questions, while the main prosodic correlate of information-seeking questions is high pitch. Phonological pitch accents and boundary tones, however, are not used to distinguish between surprise questions and information-seeking questions. Third, the nuclear accent placement signals an information structure that is associated with the expression of incongruity or counterexpectation: the focal accent can evoke an alternative (set) that arises from the speaker’s expectations.

An Empirical Study of Web Services Topics in Web Developer Discussions on Stack Overflow

Web Services (WSs) are gaining worldwide popularity due to reliable and fast intercommunication services for the development of web and mobile applications. WSs are provided to client application developers through web Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), such as YouTube API, Twitter API, Facebook API, etc. Due to the popularity of WSs, the developers frequently discuss various WSs-based application’ issues on online forums, such as Stack Overflow (SO). This study aims to highlight the problems faced by client developers in the development process of WSs-based applications using the dataset of SO. The comprehension of developers’ conversations on SO can give insight into the frequency, difficulty, and popularity of different WSs-related problems of developers. We downloaded 12,746 posts from SO relevant to WSs-related issues for this article. We used the topic modeling technique (LDA) to extract various topics from the SO dataset. The topics are labeled and organized into categories and sub-categories according to relationships among them. The difficulty and popularity of each topic have been analyzed. Our investigation yield several findings. First, developers focus on six topics related to WSs on SO: Client APIs development, Data Processing, Web services Authorization, Framework Support, Web APIs, and Mobile Applications. Secondly, the advantages and disadvantages of web applications topic (Fused_Popularity=0.39), from the Clients APIs development category have the highest prevalence, followed by Database (DB) and Data Processing in Applications topic (Fused_Popularity=0.38) from the Data Processing category. Third, most WSs-related topics in all categories are evolving promptly on SO, i.e., new questions are added daily about WSs development, deployment, and authorization. Fourth, the questions of type “how” are primarily asked in Framework support, Client APIs development, and Web APIs categories. Although, many questions in other categories are of the kind “What”. It is also observed that WSs developers not only used SO to ask How and What types of questions but they also used SO to ask information-seeking questions (i.e., in Data processing and Client APIs development categories). Fifth, the topics relevant to Web APIs (Fused_Popularity=10.8) and Client API Development ((Fused_Popularity=9.35) categories of WSs are very popular on SO. Sixth, the questions relevant to the Web APIs (Fused_Difficulty =3) & Client APIs development (Fused_Difficulty=2.25) categories are more difficult than the other four categories. The results of our research may be helpful for the following WSs stakeholders: WSs Client application developers, WSs Educators, and WSs researchers. The WSs Educators and investigators can get more knowledge of new methods and discover novel techniques to make challenging WSs topics easy to understand. WSs framework developers can utilize our extracted WSs topics and categories to know the preferences of WSs developers that may support them in upgrading existing frameworks or developing new ones.

The prosodic marking of rhetorical questions in Standard Chinese

The present study investigates the prosody of information-seeking (ISQs) and rhetorical questions (RQs) in Standard Chinese, in polar and wh-questions. Like in other languages, ISQs and RQs in Standard Chinese can have the same surface structure, allowing for a direct prosodic comparison between illocution types (ISQ vs RQ). Since Standard Chinese has lexical tone, the use of f0 as a cue to illocution type may be restricted. We investigate the prosodic differences between ISQs and RQs as well as the interplay of prosodic cues to RQs. In terms of f0, results showed that RQs were lower in f0, with the f0 range on the first word being expanded followed by f0 compression. RQs were further longer in duration and more often realized with non-modal voice quality (glottalized voice) as compared to ISQs. These prosodic cues were largely manipulated in tandem (illocutionary pairs with larger durational differences also showed larger differences in mean f0; voice quality, in turn, seemed to be an additional cue). We suggest three possible explanations (assertive force, focus, speaker attitude) that unite the present findings on RQs in Standard Chinese with the findings on RQs in other, non-tonal languages.

The interaction of discourse markers and prosody in rhetorical questions in German

Recent research has shown that rhetorical questions (RQs) have certain prosodic characteristics in terms of voice quality, tempo, and intonation, which distinguish them from genuine, information-seeking questions (ISQs). This paper focuses on the interaction between prosodic cues to rhetorical meaning on the one hand, and lexical and morpho-syntactic means, on the other, in German. The production experiment reported on here addresses three research questions, in short: (i) do speakers prefer a specific syntactic construction for an RQ, (ii) do they make use of specific lexical and morpho-syntactic means to signal rhetorical meaning, and (iii) what is the interaction between those means and prosodic cues. The answers are: (i) yes (wh-questions), (ii) yes (especially discourse markers (DiPs)), and (iii) we find an additive effect enforcing the rhetorical message. When lexical (or morpho-syntactic) cues to rhetorical meaning are used, we do not observe a reduction in or lack of prosodic means at the same time. For example, when a DiP is present, an RQ will still have a typical nuclear accent and edge tone, i.e., cues are used in an additive, rather than an exclusive way. There are, however, RQs that are marked only in the prosody, without any lexical or morpho-syntactic cues present.

ISEEQ: Information Seeking Question Generation Using Dynamic Meta-Information Retrieval and Knowledge Graphs

Conversational Information Seeking (CIS) is a relatively new research area within conversational AI that attempts to seek information from end-users in order to understand and satisfy the users' needs. If realized, such a CIS system has far-reaching benefits in the real world; for example, CIS systems can assist clinicians in pre-screening or triaging patients in healthcare. A key open sub-problem in CIS that remains unaddressed in the literature is generating Information Seeking Questions (ISQs) based on a short initial query from the end-user. To address this open problem, we propose Information SEEking Question generator (ISEEQ), a novel approach for generating ISQs from just a short user query, given a large text corpus relevant to the user query. Firstly, ISEEQ uses a knowledge graph to enrich the user query. Secondly, ISEEQ uses the knowledge-enriched query to retrieve relevant context passages to ask coherent ISQs adhering to a conceptual flow. Thirdly, ISEEQ introduces a new deep generative-adversarial reinforcement learning-based approach for generating ISQs. We show that ISEEQ can generate high-quality ISQs to promote the development of CIS agents. ISEEQ significantly outperforms comparable baselines on five ISQ evaluation metrics across four datasets having user queries from diverse domains. Further, we argue that ISEEQ is transferable across domains for generating ISQs, as it shows the acceptable performance when trained and tested on different pairs of domains. A qualitative human evaluation confirms that ISEEQ generated ISQs are comparable in quality to human-generated questions, and it outperformed the best comparable baseline.

Research on Rhetorical Devices in German: The Use of Rhetorical Questions in Sales Presentations

Previous literature recommends using stylistic (or rhetorical) devices in presentations such as rhetorical questions (RQs: Does anyone want bad teeth?) to make them more professional, to appear more charismatic, and to convince an audience. However, in oral presentations, it is not only the what that matters in using stylistic devices like RQs, but also the how, i.e., the RQs’ prosodic realization. To date, however, virtually no handbook on the way of giving a good presentation scrutinizes this prosodic how. Therefore, our investigation focuses on the prosodic realization of German RQs in sales pitches. Specifically, we carry out a perception experiment in which 72 listeners rated both the sales pitch and its speaker based on presentations that contained questions that were lexically biased towards a rhetorical interpretation. They were realized with either the prosody of RQs or information-seeking questions (ISQs: What time is it?). An additional baseline condition was constituted by regular declarative statements with the corresponding prosody. More precisely, we investigate whether particular identified prosodic realizations—previously found for German RQs and ISQs—meet the listeners’ expectation in the context of a presentation situation. We found that listeners prefer lexically marked RQs that are produced with a prosody that is characteristic of German ISQs. We therefore suggest that handbooks should provide their readers not only with clear definitions of RQs as a stylistic device in presentations (i.e., the what), but also with the respective prosodic realization (i.e., the how) to make them a properly implemented stylistic device.

Intonation Patterns in Argentinean- and Venezuelan-Canadian Heritage Speakers of Spanish

An encompassing study projected by Rao (2016) identified various factors such as transfer from English, parental input, and pragmatic context as contributing to the source of variation in the production of nuclear (i.e., final) intonation in the Spanish of heritage speakers (HSs) of Mexican Spanish who lived in the United States. The current study expands on Rao (2016) by quantifying the degree of similarity to (a) English and (b) parental intonation patterns in nuclear yes-no question intonation in Porteño (i.e., Buenos Aires, Argentina) Spanish HSs and Caraqueño (i.e., Caracas, Venezuela) Spanish HSs living in Ontario, Canada. Whereas the intonation contour in absolute interrogative questions in Canadian English is primarily ascending (Séguinot, 1976), it is often descending in Porteño (Gabriel et al., 2010) and Caraqueño Spanish (Sosa, 1999). Therefore, these groups of bilinguals lend themselves well to a study examining whether heritage intonational phonology is more influenced by parental input or whether it exhibits drift towards English. We tested eight adult English-dominant HSs – four of Argentinean heritage and four of Venezuelan heritage  – and their parents. All participants filled out the Bilingual Language Profile (BLP; Birdsong, Gertken & Amengual, 2012). The participants were also asked to complete a semi-spontaneous task, where they were presented with fictional scenarios (identical in both languages) and asked to respond (e.g., Fictional Scenario: Entrás a un negocio donde nunca estuviste antes y preguntás si tienen mandarinas (You walk into a store that you’ve never been to before and ask if they have any mandarins) Anticipated utterance: ¿Tienen mandarinas? (Do you have any mandarins?)). Pragmatic context was controlled and taken into account with the elicitation of 6 different kinds of yes-no questions: surprise questions, requests, information-seeking questions, confirmation, offers and orders. The tasks were completed by both HSs and their parents; they first completed the task in Spanish, followed by English. English-speaking controls completed the same tasks only in English. This study only focuses on the Spanish stimuli of the HSs and their parents as well as the English of the control group. Results were caluclated using the total percent of frequencies of pitch accents across all participants. To analyze the impact of group on these pitch accents, a 3 x 4 Chi-squared was run across group and pitch accent, reavealing a significant impact of group on the frequency of pitch accent (p < 0.001, φ = 0.39). While L+H* showed a numerical declining trend across the three groups, this effect did not achieve significance (max absolute SR = 1.1). L* showed an increase across groups that achieved marginal significance (max absolute SR = -1.9). L+¡H* showed a significant decrease across the three groups (max absolute SR = -2.5). H+L* showed a significant difference across groups, however, this change was driven by a greater frequency in the monolingual English group (SR = 2.8), with no parametric trend across the three groups. An analysis was then run to analyze the impact of group on these boundary tones within the Argentinean group (p < 0.001, φ = 0.54)  and then the Venezuelan group (p < 0.001, φ = 0.65), a 3 x 3 Chi-squared was run across generation and boundary, revealing a significant impact of generation on the frequency of boundary tone. Parental influence on pitch accent, nuclear pitch configuration, and boundary tones was also investigated. The proportion for each response characteristic for each child was paired with their parent’s proportion of responses (e.g. Child 1’s proportion of responses with a L* pitch accent was paired with their parent’s proportion of responses with an L* pitch accent), and bivariate Pearson correlations were performed for each type of characteristic. Parents’ pitch accents were significantly related to their child’s proportions of pitch accents (r(34) = 0.46, p = 0.005, CI = [0.15 0.68]). Neither boundary tone (r(16) = 0.18, p = 0.49, CI = [-0.32 0.59]) nor nuclear pitch configuration (r(16) = 0.21, p = 0.40, CI = [-0.28 0.62]) showed any significant relationship between parent and child. In sum, the results reveal that, while we do note parental influence on pitch accents, we do not observe this effect much on heritage speakers' boundary tones and nuclear pitch configurations, where we ascertain shifts toward English in heritage Spanish question intonation.

TopiOCQA: Open-domain Conversational Question Answering with Topic Switching

Abstract In a conversational question answering scenario, a questioner seeks to extract information about a topic through a series of interdependent questions and answers. As the conversation progresses, they may switch to related topics, a phenomenon commonly observed in information-seeking search sessions. However, current datasets for conversational question answering are limiting in two ways: 1) they do not contain topic switches; and 2) they assume the reference text for the conversation is given, that is, the setting is not open-domain. We introduce TopiOCQA (pronounced Tapioca), an open-domain conversational dataset with topic switches based on Wikipedia. TopiOCQA contains 3,920 conversations with information-seeking questions and free-form answers. On average, a conversation in our dataset spans 13 question-answer turns and involves four topics (documents). TopiOCQA poses a challenging test-bed for models, where efficient retrieval is required on multiple turns of the same conversation, in conjunction with constructing valid responses using conversational history. We evaluate several baselines, by combining state-of-the-art document retrieval methods with neural reader models. Our best model achieves F1 of 55.8, falling short of human performance by 14.2 points, indicating the difficulty of our dataset. Our dataset and code are available at https://mcgill-nlp.github.io/topiocqa.

Self-addressed questions and honorifications: The case of Japanese daroo-ka/desyoo-ka

Abstract Japanese self-addressed questions (SAQs) are either marked with SAQ question particles (i.e. kana, yara) or marked with modals daroo or desyoo. The present paper argues that the pragmatic profile of Japanese SAQs should not be limited to solitary contexts. The paper presents an experiment examining whether daroo-ka/desyoo-ka can be perceived as SAQs in the accompanied contexts. The results of the experiment indicate that Japanese SAQs can be felicitously uttered in the presence of a second (socially higher) person. Apart from the experimental study, this paper also presents a pilot study of comparing daroo-ka questions and plain information-seeking questions (i.e. those without daroo-ka) in urgent situation contexts. The preliminary results shed light on the fact that Japanese native speakers interpret daroo-ka questions as canonical questions in the performance of indirect speech acts.

Non-serious answers to (improper) questions in talk shows

While answers are constrained by the formal, functional and sequential properties of questions, this does not mean that those answering questions do not seek to respond in ways that resist or push back against those constraints. In this paper, we examine instances where guests on Iranian talk shows respond to a preceding information-seeking question with an incongruous or irrelevant answer that is framed as nonserious. We suggest that non-serious answers are a means by which respondents construe the prior question as improper, but also inoculate themselves against a (potential) charge of being overly-sensitive or too easily offended. However, while nonserious answers construe a prior question as improper, they do not forestall that question-answer sequence. It is only when the question-recipient proffers a subsequent non-answer response that the host admits to the potential impropriety of their line of questioning and moves to close the sequence. In cases where the question-recipient provides a serious answer following the initial non-serious response, the question-answer sequence is extended. We conclude that non-serious answers strike a delicate balance between drawing attention to the impropriety of someone else's question without completely forestalling the overall progressivity of social interaction.

Voice quality and speaking rate in Icelandic rhetorical questions

AbstractIn this paper, we show that Icelandic uses the phonetic parameters of speaking rate, duration and voice quality (VQ) to distinguish between information-seeking questions (ISQs) and rhetorical questions (RQs). Specifically, durations are longer (speaking rate is slower) and nonmodal VQs are used more in RQs than in ISQs. Our findings for temporal parameters fit in with previous studies on the prosody of RQs in various languages. With respect to VQ, Icelandic differs, for example, from German and English in the location of breathy voice in the utterance (utterance-initial in German and English, utterance-final in Icelandic). We interpret the utterance-final position of breathiness in Icelandic RQs as a potential compensating strategy for the lack of phonological cues, i.e. boundary tones.

On the discourse pragmatics of German wh-headlines

AbstractThis paper deals with autonomous uses of German subordinate wh-interrogatives as headlines, so-called wh-headlines (e.g.Was Kinder brauchen, ‘What children need’), which we approach from a discourse-pragmatic and diachronic perspective. We take our starting point in the QUD-based, discourse-pragmatic model of interrogatives as proposed by Rosemeyer (this issue). Applying this model, first, to the case of wh-headlines in present-day news discourse, we develop the hypothesis that a writer in using a wh-headline may explicitly introduce an implicit QUD into discourse without posing it as an information-seeking question. In a second step, we assess this hypothesis with respect to the use of wh-headlines in various genres from the Middle High German and Early New High German periods, for which we provide three in-depth case studies. The case studies are contextualized against the backdrop of reflections on potential impact factors in the diachronic evolvement of this particular writing practice. Overall, the results of our study can be taken to lend support to our hypothesis also for genres other than news discourse and for time periods other than modern German.

The prosody of French rhetorical questions

Abstract Besides information-seeking questions, there are all kinds of non-standard questions, whose function is not to request information from the addressee, but rather to convey information about the speaker’s epistemic or emotional state. These include rhetorical questions, surprise questions, incredulity questions, etc. This paper focuses on rhetorical questions (RQs), a sub-type of non-canonical questions, and presents the first production experiment which has investigated them in French to date. We compared string-identical rhetorical and information seeking questions (ISQs) in French. Experimental design and preliminary results are presented and discussed. In the final part of the paper, we discuss possible correlations between these findings and the semantic and pragmatic properties that distinguish RQs from ISQs.

Surprise questions in spoken French

Abstract This paper offers a pragmatic account of two wh-questions in French used non-canonically - c’est quoi, ce N and qu’est-ce que constructions. It is claimed that in this non-canonical use, both constructions express surprise. As these constructions may be syntactically ambiguous between an information-seeking reading and a surprise reading, it is expected that the two readings differ in terms of prosody. This hypothesis is supported by the results of a production experiment. Experimental evidence shows significant prosodic differences between syntactically similar information-seeking questions and surprise questions. Surprise questions exhibit an increase in lengthening, slower speech rate and less frequent rising final contours.

Effects of outlines and information seeking on learning outcomes in video-based environments

ABSTRACT Learning from videos is becoming an important part of educational activities. Whereas outlines have great potential, particularly during information seeking (IS), few studies have so far explored the effect of their presence in videos. The two aims of the present study were thus to 1) evaluate the influence of outlines on IS and learning, and 2) analyze the extent to which an IS task can optimize the use of outlines during learning. As outlines are known to have a positive impact on video representation during IS tasks, we predicted that performing an IS task prior to a learning task featuring an outline would result in better content representation by learners. A total of 103 participants were divided into four groups (2 × 2 factorial design): with or without an outline, and with or without IS questions before learning. Results indicated that the presence of an outline promotes topic recall in terms of both the number and organization of the topics recalled, and performing an IS task with an outline before learning promotes content memorization to a small extent. Results are discussed in terms of engagement and metacognitive processes.

Prosody is adding what?: Echo questions are not a thing

While echo questions (EcQs) are often said to be identified by their prosodic properties, there is no empirical study actually supporting such claim. Focusing on wh-utterances we provide results from a production study, a classifier, and a perception study to argue that prosody is not a reliable cue to identify an inquisitive utterance as EcQ. We also offer a model that unifies the semantics of utterances inquiring about what has just been said (EcQs) and utterances inquiring about ‘non-discursive’ facts, information seeking questions (InfQs), while keeping the interpretation of the utterance true to form.

The prosody of rhetorical questions: a cross-linguistic view

This paper provides a survey of our knowledge of the prosody of rhetorical questions, i.e. questions that do not require an answer and try to commit the listener to the presupposed answer, as compared to the prosody of string-identical genuine, information seeking-questions. The survey includes semantic literature on questions, corpus data, and experimental evidence from production and perception experiments. It covers a range of typologically different languages (German, English, Icelandic, Italian, Standard Chinese, Cantonese, Japanese, French) that have different word-level and phrase-level characteristics. The main finding is that rhetorical and information seeking questions differ reliably in terms of the following prosodic characteristics: (i) f0-features (e.g., position and type of pitch accent, type of boundary tone, as well as more global f0-parameters, depending on language type); (ii) duration / speaking rate (rhetorical questions are typically longer / produced with slower speaking rate than information-seeking questions). Often, but not always, rhetorical questions are produced with non-modal voice quality.