Asking too much? The rhetorical role of questions in political discourse

Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1558–1572 Copenhagen, Denmark, September 7–11, 2017. c⃝2017 Association for Computational Linguistics Asking too much? The rhetorical role of questions in political discourse Justine Zhang,1 Arthur Spirling,2 Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil1 1Cornell University, 2New York University jz727@cornell.edu, arthur.spirling@nyu.edu, cristian@cs.cornell.edu Abstract Questions play a prominent role in social interactions, performing rhetorical func- tions that go beyond that of simple infor- mational exchange. The surface form of a question can signal the intention and back- ground of the person asking it, as well as the nature of their relation with the inter- locutor. While the informational nature of questions has been extensively examined in the context of question-answering appli- cations, their rhetorical aspects have been largely understudied. In this work we introduce an unsupervised methodology for extracting surface mo- tifs that recur in questions, and for group- ing them according to their latent rhetor- ical role. By applying this framework to the setting of question sessions in the UK parliament, we show that the resulting ty- pology encodes key aspects of the politi- cal discourse—such as the bifurcation in questioning behavior between government and opposition parties—and reveals new insights into the effects of a legislator’s tenure and political career ambitions. 1 Introduction “We’d now like to open the floor to shorter speeches disguised as questions...” – Steve Macone, New Yorker cartoon caption Why do we ask questions? Perhaps we are seek- ing factual information that others hold, or maybe we are requesting a favor. Alternatively we could be simply making a rhetorical point, perhaps at the start of an academic paper. Questions play a prominent role in social inter- actions (Goffman, 1976), performing a multitude of rhetorical functions that go beyond mere factual information gathering (Kearsley, 1976). While the informational component of questions has been well-studied in the context of question-answering applications, there is relatively little computational work addressing the rhetorical and social role of these basic dialogic units. One domain where questions have a particularly salient rhetorical role is politics. The ability to question the actions and intentions of governments is a crucial part of democracy (Pitkin, 1967), par- ticularly in parliamentary systems. Consequently, scholars have studied parliamentary questions in detail, in terms of their origins (Chester and Bowring, 1962), their institutionalization (Eggers and Spirling, 2014) and their importance for over- sight (Proksch and Slapin, 2011). In particular, the United Kingdom’s House of Commons, renowned for theatrical questions periods, has been stud- ied in some depth. However, those accounts are largely qualitative in nature (Bull and Wells, 2012; Bates et al., 2014). The present work: methodology. In order to approach these problems computationally, we in- troduce an unsupervised framework to structure the space of questions according to their rhetori- cal role. First, we identify common ways in which questions are phrased. To this end, we automati- cally extract these recurring surface forms, or mo- tifs, based on the lexico-syntactic structure of the questions posed (Section 4). To capture rhetorical aspects we …

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