What do newspapers , watches , credit cards , and liquors bottles have in common ? A computational exploration of question behavior

What makes a question useful? What makes an answer appropriate? In this paper, we show that a recently proposed probabilistic model of question-answer behavior provides a unifying account of four separate effects from the psycholinguistics and pragmatics literature. For three of these effects, we formulate a pragmatic answerer who is informative with respect to the questioner’s underlying goals (or QUD), which are inferred given the context. These simple applications illustrate the role of the QUD in guiding answerer inference. In the final effect we model, the questioner’s QUD affects the question they choose to ask; thus, our pragmatic answerer may use the question utterance itself as a signal to help infer the questioner’s goals.