Exploring The Role Of Context To Distinguish Rhetorical And Information-Seeking Questions

Social media posts often contain questions, but many of the questions are rhetorical and do not seek information. Our work studies the problem of distinguishing rhetorical and information-seeking questions on Twitter. Most work has focused on features of the question itself, but we hypothesize that the prior context plays a role too. This paper introduces a new dataset containing questions in tweets paired with their prior tweets to provide context. We create classification models to assess the difficulty of distinguishing rhetorical and information-seeking questions, and experiment with different properties of the prior context. Our results show that the prior tweet and topic features can improve performance on this task.