Toward a redefinition of yes/no questions

Authors:
Julia Hirschberg
Affiliations:
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
Venue:
ACL '84 Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 22nd annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
Year:
1984

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Abstract

While both theoretical and empirical studies of question-answering have revealed the inadequacy of traditional definitions of yes-no questions (YNQs), little progress has been made toward a more satisfactory redefinition. This paper reviews the limitations of several proposed revisions. It proposes a new definition of YNQs based upon research on a type of conversational implicature, termed here scalar implicature, that helps define appropriate responses to YNQs. By representing YNQs as scalar queries it is possible to support a wider variety of system and user responses in a principled way.