Effective models of social dialog must understand a broad range of rhetorical and figurative devices. 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. While there are computational models for other forms of figurative language, rhetorical questions have received little attention to date. We expand a small dataset from previous work, presenting a corpus of 10,270 RQs from debate forums and Twitter that represent different discourse functions. We show that we can clearly distinguish between RQs and sincere questions (0.76 F1). We then show that RQs can be used both sarcastically and non-sarcastically, observing that non-sarcastic (other) uses of RQs are frequently argumentative in forums, and persuasive in tweets. We present experiments to distinguish between these uses of RQs using SVM and LSTM models that represent linguistic features and post-level context, achieving results as high as 0.76 F1 for "sarcastic" and 0.77 F1 for "other" in forums, and 0.83 F1 for both "sarcastic" and "other" in tweets. We supplement our quantitative experiments with an in-depth characterization of the linguistic variation in RQs.

本文绘制了一系列修辞问题(RQs)，阐述其在不同的语境中的论点阐述作用和说服作用，通过SVM和LSTM对RQs结构和上下文进行建模，成功地将其分为讽刺和其他两种类型，在推特中达到0.83的F1值的预测准确率，同时进行了深入的关于RQs的语言学变化的表征。

你是认真的吗？：社交媒体对话中的反问和讽刺