Querent Intent in Multi-Sentence Questions

Multi-sentence questions (MSQs) are sequences of questions connected by relations which, unlike sequences of standalone questions, need to be answered as a unit. Following Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), we recognise that different "question discourse relations" between the subparts of MSQs reflect different speaker intents, and consequently elicit different answering strategies. Correctly identifying these relations is therefore a crucial step in automatically answering MSQs. We identify five different types of MSQs in English, and define five novel relations to describe them. We extract over 162,000 MSQs from Stack Exchange to enable future research. Finally, we implement a high-precision baseline classifier based on surface features.

[1]  Jian Zhang,et al.  SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text , 2016, EMNLP.

[2]  Oren Etzioni,et al.  Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge , 2018, ArXiv.

[3]  Akihiro Tamura,et al.  Classification of Multiple-Sentence Questions , 2005, IJCNLP.

[4]  Soumen Chakrabarti,et al.  Enhanced Answer Type Inference from Questions using Sequential Models , 2005, HLT/EMNLP.

[5]  Eunsol Choi,et al.  QuAC: Question Answering in Context , 2018, EMNLP.

[6]  Eunsol Choi,et al.  TriviaQA: A Large Scale Distantly Supervised Challenge Dataset for Reading Comprehension , 2017, ACL.

[7]  Annie Louis,et al.  Recovering discourse relations: Varying influence of discourse adverbials , 2015, LSDSem@EMNLP.

[8]  Jerry R. Hobbs.  Coherence and Coreference , 1979, Cogn. Sci..

[9]  Siobhan Chapman.  Logic and Conversation , 2005 .

[10]  Guillaume Bouchard,et al.  Interpretation of Natural Language Rules in Conversational Machine Reading , 2018, EMNLP.

[11]  Livio Robaldo,et al.  The Penn Discourse Treebank 2.0 Annotation Manual , 2007 .

[12]  Alex Lascarides,et al.  Edinburgh Research Explorer Using automatically labelled examples to classify rhetorical relations: an assessment , 2022 .

[13]  William C. Mann,et al.  Rhetorical Structure Theory: Toward a functional theory of text organization , 1988 .

[14]  Jeffrey D. Robinson,et al.  “How are you?”: Negotiating phatic communion , 1992, Language in Society.

[15]  Zengchang Qin,et al.  Question Classification using Head Words and their Hypernyms , 2008, EMNLP.

[16]  Mohan John Blooma,et al.  Research Issues In Community Based Question Answering , 2011, PACIS.

[17]  Margaret Mitchell,et al.  VQA: Visual Question Answering , 2015, International Journal of Computer Vision.

[18]  Danqi Chen,et al.  CoQA: A Conversational Question Answering Challenge , 2018, TACL.

[19]  Timothy Baldwin,et al.  langid.py: An Off-the-shelf Language Identification Tool , 2012, ACL.

[20]  Manfred Stede,et al.  Discourse Processing , 2011, NAACL.