Polar Express: Polar Question Forms Expressing Bias-Evidence Conflicts in Italian

Abstract

Past research has concentrated on the use of different forms of polar questions in specific contexts, defined in terms of the relationship between original bias and contextual evidence. It has been showed that, for English and German, people tend to prefer specific forms given the pragmatic context. Based on previous experiments, in this work, we observe that the same tendencies occur in Italian. Also, we adopt a more refined experimental setup with three different tasks and a more natural evaluation scale to better capture nuances in appropriateness evaluations, provided by human subjects, which therefore reflects the more realistic one-to-many relationship among forms and functions. In fact, the results show how specific forms of polar questions are especially typical of situations where the bias has the opposite value with respect to the evidence, i.e., in positive bias versus negative evidence, for which a high negative polar question in the past tense was more frequently selected by the subjects (Note 1).

Cutting melted butter? Common Ground inconsistencies management in dialogue systems using graph databases

“…The experiment illustrated in (Domaneschi, Romero, and Braun 2017;Di Maro, Origlia, and Cutugno 2021) pointed out the importance speakers give to the syntactic form with respect to the pragmatic needs. Results showed that the use of high negation polar questions better suits the pragmatic need of referring to a specific type of conflict between an original bias and an opposing contextual evidence.…”

Graph-based representations of clarification strategies supporting automatic dialogue management

“…Our infrastructure provides three possible validation types: one that verifies if the retrieved entity exists on the DB that has to be queried; another that makes a formal control on a specific data type; another based on dictionaries, which can be stored in the knowledge graph or in an external source. 15 For Italian we refer to DiMaro et al (2021b) who, starting from Domaneschi's data, propose an extended version of their experiments whose results exhibit that also in Italian, in such pragmatic conditions, the preferred CR form is High Negative Polar Question, mainly expressed in the past tense.…”