Briefly, what is this paper about in YOUR OWN WORDS?
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. The authors claim that while there are computational models for other forms of figurative speech RQs have received little attention. The authors of the paper have conducted an in-depth study dedicated to the identification of RQs and sarcasm in social media. This paper is the continuation of authors’ previous efforts to distinguish RQs and Sincere Questions, and Sarcastic and Non-sarcastic RQs using baseline models like N-Grams and Google word2vec. The authors have used the heuristics from …show more content…
The paper focuses on different experiments to identify RQs in social media scenarios like debate forums and twitter corpus and further identifying sarcastic and other RQs. Traditional models like Google Word2Vec and novel models like SVM and LSTM are used to study the contextual and linguistic dependencies and improve the classification results. The authors stress on the qualitative analysis of the results and try to explore the contextual dependency by adding various features to the training sets. This can be explained by the high precision, recall, and F1 scores obtained after adding linguistic characteristics and pre and post contextual features to the training set. Also, a major trend of using RQs for arguments in debate forums and for persuasion in Twitter sets is observed. All these features can be further explored in depth thus acting as a baseline to the research involving RQs and their use for