The Keystone Role Played by Questions in Debate

Zlata Kikteva, Kamila Gorska, Wassiliki Siskou, Annette Hautli-Janisz, Chris Reed


Abstract
Building on the recent results of a study into the roles that are played by questions in argumentative dialogue (Hautli-Janisz et al.,2022a), we expand the analysis to investigate a newly released corpus that constitutes the largest extant corpus of closely annotated debate. Questions play a critical role in driving dialogical discourse forward; in combative or critical discursive environments, they not only provide a range of discourse management techniques, they also scaffold the semantic structure of the positions that interlocutors develop. The boundaries, however, between providing substantive answers to questions, merely responding to questions, and evading questions entirely, are fuzzy and the way in which answers, responses and evasions affect the subsequent development of dialogue and argumentation structure are poorly understood. In this paper, we explore how questions have ramifications on the large-scale structure of a debate using as our substrate the BBC television programme Question Time, the foremost topical debate show in the UK. Analysis of the data demonstrates not only that questioning plays a particularly prominent role in such debate, but also that its repercussions can reverberate through a discourse.
Anthology ID:
2022.codi-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse
Month:
October
Year:
2022
Address:
Gyeongju, Republic of Korea and Online
Editors:
Chloe Braud, Christian Hardmeier, Junyi Jessy Li, Sharid Loaiciga, Michael Strube, Amir Zeldes
Venue:
CODI
SIG:
Publisher:
International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
54–63
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.codi-1.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zlata Kikteva, Kamila Gorska, Wassiliki Siskou, Annette Hautli-Janisz, and Chris Reed. 2022. The Keystone Role Played by Questions in Debate. In Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Discourse, pages 54–63, Gyeongju, Republic of Korea and Online. International Conference on Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Keystone Role Played by Questions in Debate (Kikteva et al., CODI 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.codi-1.8.pdf