Query responses

Abstract

Keywords: questions, query responses, corpus study, KoSIn this article we consider the phenomenon of answering a query with a query. Although such answers are common, no large-scale, corpusbased characterization exists, with the exception of clarification requests. After briefly reviewing different theoretical approaches on this subject, we present a corpus study of query responses in the British National Corpus and develop a taxonomy for query responses. We identify a variety of response categories that have not been formalized in previous dialogue work, particularly those relevant to adversarial interaction. We show that different response categories have significantly different rates of subsequent answer provision. We provide a formal analysis of the response categories within the framework of KoS.

Characterizing the Response Space of Questions: a Corpus Study for English and Polish

“…As might be expected from the results presented in (Łupkowski and Ginzburg, 2016) Figure 2: Frequency of responses to questions for the BNC (n=506), BEE (n=256), MapTask (n=467) and Spokes (n=205) studies guages are CHT and IDK. For the latter, we observe that it was more frequent in Polish than in the English data.…”

“…By and large, the hypothesis achieves wide coverage, as we discuss in section 5. We sketch an account of how the different classes can be characterized, taking a fairly general perspective and building on the initial characterization of (Łupkowski and Ginzburg, 2016) while drawing some metatheoretical conclusions. Finally, section 8 offers a variety of extensions we plan to undertake.…”

“…Indirect answers (IA) involve an inference of an answer from the utterance, as in 4 Here A has to infer the answer to his/her questions from B's suggestion that this issue has been addressed before. For the non-answer group the taxonomy (mostly) reuses the classes proposed in (Łupkowski and Ginzburg, 2013Ginzburg, , 2016 with some minor renaming.…”

“…A natural way to analyze utterances relating to MOTIV is along the lines of a rule akin to QSPEC above: If A has posed q, B may follow up with an utterance specific to the issue ?Wish-Answer(B,q) (Łupkowski and Ginzburg, 2016) postulate fairly strong constraints on CHT and IGNORE to ensure that they are not unrestricted and do not allow any issue in. IGNORE is assumed to require the issue to be situationally shared with the posed question q1.…”

“…

The main aim of this paper is to provide a characterization of the response space for questions using a taxonomy grounded in a dialogical formal semantics. As a starting point we take the typology for responses in the form of questions provided in (Łupkowski and Ginzburg, 2016). This work develops a wide coverage taxonomy for question/question sequences observable in corpora including the BNC, CHILDES, and BEE, as well as formal modelling of all the postulated classes.

…”