research-article

Understanding and Identifying Rhetorical Questions in Social Media

Authors:

Suhas Ranganath,

Huan LiuAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST), Volume 9, Issue 2

Article No.: 17, Pages 1 - 22

https://doi.org/10.1145/3108364

Published: 10 January 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Social media provides a platform for seeking information from a large user base. Information seeking in social media, however, occurs simultaneously with users expressing their viewpoints by making statements. Rhetorical questions have the form of a question but serve the function of a statement and are an important tool employed by users to express their viewpoints. Therefore, rhetorical questions might mislead platforms assisting information seeking in social media. It becomes difficult to identify rhetorical questions as they are not syntactically different from other questions. In this article, we develop a framework to identify rhetorical questions by modeling some motivations of the users to post them. We focus on two motivations of the users drawing from linguistic theories to implicitly convey a message and to modify the strength of a statement previously made. We develop a quantitative framework from these motivations to identify rhetorical questions in social media. We evaluate the framework using two datasets of questions posted on a social media platform Twitter and demonstrate its effectiveness in identifying rhetorical questions. This is the first framework, to the best of our knowledge, to model the possible motivations for posting rhetorical questions to identify them on social media platforms.

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Cited By

Džemal Š(2023)On the use of rhetorical questions in tweets related to the Russia-Ukrainian war: Podolyak vs PolyanskiyDiscourse and Interaction10.5817/DI2023-2-7516:2(75-97)Online publication date: 20-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.5817/DI2023-2-75
Chen JLin YTang XDeng S(2023)Fostering netizens to engage in rumour-refuting messages of government social media: a view of persuasion theoryBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2023.224108443:10(2071-2095)Online publication date: 28-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2023.2241084
Gunal AStewart IMihalcea RPérez-Rosas V(2023)Understanding the Role of Questions in Mental Health Support-Seeking ForumsArtificial Intelligence for Personalized Medicine10.1007/978-3-031-36938-4_21(289-299)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36938-4_21
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Index Terms

Understanding and Identifying Rhetorical Questions in Social Media
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Information retrieval query processing
  2. World Wide Web
    1. Web searching and information discovery
      1. Web search engines

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology

ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology Volume 9, Issue 2

Regular Papers

March 2018

191 pages

ISSN:2157-6904

EISSN:2157-6912

DOI:10.1145/3154791

Editor:
Yu Zheng
Microsoft Research, China

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2018 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 10 January 2018

Accepted: 01 June 2017

Revised: 01 May 2017

Received: 01 August 2016

Published in TIST Volume 9, Issue 2

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Cited By

Džemal Š(2023)On the use of rhetorical questions in tweets related to the Russia-Ukrainian war: Podolyak vs PolyanskiyDiscourse and Interaction10.5817/DI2023-2-7516:2(75-97)Online publication date: 20-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.5817/DI2023-2-75
Chen JLin YTang XDeng S(2023)Fostering netizens to engage in rumour-refuting messages of government social media: a view of persuasion theoryBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2023.224108443:10(2071-2095)Online publication date: 28-Jul-2023
https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2023.2241084
Gunal AStewart IMihalcea RPérez-Rosas V(2023)Understanding the Role of Questions in Mental Health Support-Seeking ForumsArtificial Intelligence for Personalized Medicine10.1007/978-3-031-36938-4_21(289-299)Online publication date: 2-Sep-2023
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36938-4_21
Zare Chahooki Mkhalifeh zadeh z(2022)A General Investigation on the Combination of Local and Global Feature Selection Methods for Request Identification on TelegramSignal and Data Processing10.52547/jsdp.19.2.17519:2(175-196)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2022
https://doi.org/10.52547/jsdp.19.2.175
Li MShi JChen Y(2022)Identifying Influences in Patient Decision-making Processes in Online Health Communities: Data Science ApproachJournal of Medical Internet Research10.2196/3063424:8(e30634)Online publication date: 31-Aug-2022
https://doi.org/10.2196/30634
Al-Ramahi MAlsmadi I(2021)Classifying insincere questions on Question Answering (QA) websites: meta-textual features and word embeddingJournal of Business Analytics10.1080/2573234X.2021.1895681(1-12)Online publication date: 7-Mar-2021
https://doi.org/10.1080/2573234X.2021.1895681
Suzuki RNadamoto A(2020)Extracting Rhetorical Question from TwitterProceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Information Integration and Web-based Applications & Services10.1145/3428757.3429123(290-299)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2020
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3428757.3429123
Li MShi JChen Y(2019)Analyzing Patient Decision Making in Online Health Communities2019 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI)10.1109/ICHI.2019.8904879(1-8)Online publication date: Jun-2019
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICHI.2019.8904879

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