Are you serious?: Rhetorical questions and sarcasm in social media dialog

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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.

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APA

Oraby, S., Harrison, V., Misra, A., Riloff, E., & Walker, M. (2017). Are you serious?: Rhetorical questions and sarcasm in social media dialog. In SIGDIAL 2017 - 18th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue, Proceedings of the Conference (pp. 310–319). Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL). https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w17-5537

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