A question may be asked not only to elicit information, but also to make a statement. Questions serving the latter purpose, called rhetorical questions, are often lexically and syntactically indistinguishable from other types of questions. Still, it is desirable to be able to identify rhetorical questions, as it is relevant for many NLP tasks, including information extraction and text summariza...

Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) are known to be licensed in wh-questions. But not all wh-questions behave alike with respect to NPI licensing. As pointed out in Han and Siegel (1996), while all argument wh-questions with NPIs can have a RHETORICAL QUESTION reading, only a subset of them can have a true wh-question reading. In this paper, we point out that adjunct wh-questions with NPIs cannot ha...

Dans cet article, j’analyse la stratégie rhétorique qui oriente l’affirmation d’un membre de l’élite l’État São Paulo (rapportée par Lévi-Strauss dans Tristes Tropiques) que les colons portugais avaient exterminé tous indigènes brésiliens et l’une des méthodes d’extermination était l’offre aux vêtements infectés variole. Je compare structure ce récit avec mythes grecs comme celui Médée ou Déjan...

In this article, we propose a novel method for generating engaging multi-modal content automatically from text. Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) is used to decompose text into discourse units and to identify rhetorical discourse relations between them. Rhetorical relations are then mapped to question–answer pairs in an information preserving way, i.e., the original text and the resulting dialo...

This study investigates for the first time comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they not used to request information, but express speaker’s belief that answer is already obvious. special pragmatic meaning often arises by means specific prosodic and lexical-syntactic cues. Being childhood learners, children have acquire concept ...

The availability of huge amounts of online opinions has created a new need to develop effective query-based opinion summarizers to analyze this information in order to facilitate decision making at every level. To develop an effective opinion summarization approach, we have targeted to resolve specifically Question Irrelevancy and Discourse Incoherency problems which have been found to be the m...

Questions play a prominent role in social interactions, performing rhetorical functions that go beyond that of simple informational exchange. The surface form of a question can signal the intention and background of the person asking it, as well as the nature of their relation with the interlocutor. While the informational nature of questions has been extensively examined in the context of ques...

Explaining why the same passage may have different rhetorical structures when conveyed in different languages remains an open question. Starting from a trilingual translation corpus, this paper aims to provide a new qualitative method for the comparison of rhetorical structures in different languages and to specify why translated texts may differ in their rhetorical structures. To achieve these...