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    <abstract>Effective models of social dialog must understand a broad range of rhetorical and figurative devices. Rhetorical questions (RQs) are a type of figurative language whose aim is to achieve a pragmatic goal, such as structuring an argument, being persuasive, emphasizing a point, or being ironic. While there are computational models for other forms of figurative language, rhetorical questions have received little attention to date. We expand a small dataset from previous work, presenting a corpus of 10,270 RQs from debate forums and Twitter that represent different discourse functions. We show that we can clearly distinguish between RQs and sincere questions (0.76 F1). We then show that RQs can be used both sarcastically and non-sarcastically, observing that non-sarcastic (other) uses of RQs are frequently argumentative in forums, and persuasive in tweets. We present experiments to distinguish between these uses of RQs using SVM and LSTM models that represent linguistic features and post-level context, achieving results as high as 0.76 F1 for “sarcastic” and 0.77 F1 for “other” in forums, and 0.83 F1 for both “sarcastic” and “other” in tweets. We supplement our quantitative experiments with an in-depth characterization of the linguistic variation in RQs.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Are you serious?: Rhetorical Questions and Sarcasm in Social Media Dialog
%A Oraby, Shereen
%A Harrison, Vrindavan
%A Misra, Amita
%A Riloff, Ellen
%A Walker, Marilyn
%Y Jokinen, Kristiina
%Y Stede, Manfred
%Y DeVault, David
%Y Louis, Annie
%S Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
%D 2017
%8 August
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Saarbrücken, Germany
%F oraby-etal-2017-serious
%X Effective models of social dialog must understand a broad range of rhetorical and figurative devices. Rhetorical questions (RQs) are a type of figurative language whose aim is to achieve a pragmatic goal, such as structuring an argument, being persuasive, emphasizing a point, or being ironic. While there are computational models for other forms of figurative language, rhetorical questions have received little attention to date. We expand a small dataset from previous work, presenting a corpus of 10,270 RQs from debate forums and Twitter that represent different discourse functions. We show that we can clearly distinguish between RQs and sincere questions (0.76 F1). We then show that RQs can be used both sarcastically and non-sarcastically, observing that non-sarcastic (other) uses of RQs are frequently argumentative in forums, and persuasive in tweets. We present experiments to distinguish between these uses of RQs using SVM and LSTM models that represent linguistic features and post-level context, achieving results as high as 0.76 F1 for “sarcastic” and 0.77 F1 for “other” in forums, and 0.83 F1 for both “sarcastic” and “other” in tweets. We supplement our quantitative experiments with an in-depth characterization of the linguistic variation in RQs.
%R 10.18653/v1/W17-5537
%U https://aclanthology.org/W17-5537
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W17-5537
%P 310-319

Markdown (Informal)

[Are you serious?: Rhetorical Questions and Sarcasm in Social Media Dialog](https://aclanthology.org/W17-5537) (Oraby et al., SIGDIAL 2017)

• Are you serious?: Rhetorical Questions and Sarcasm in Social Media Dialog (Oraby et al., SIGDIAL 2017)

ACL

• Shereen Oraby, Vrindavan Harrison, Amita Misra, Ellen Riloff, and Marilyn Walker. 2017. Are you serious?: Rhetorical Questions and Sarcasm in Social Media Dialog. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 310–319, Saarbrücken, Germany. Association for Computational Linguistics.