Studying Rhetorically Ambiguous Questions

AbstractDistinguishing between rhetorical questions and informational questions is a challenging task, as many rhetorical questions have similar surface forms to informational questions. Existing datasets, however, do not contain many questions that can be rhetorical or informational in different contexts. We introduce Studying Rhetorically Ambiguous Questions (SRAQ), a new dataset explicitly constructed to support the study of such rhetorical ambiguity. The questions in SRAQ can be interpreted as either rhetorical or informational depending on the context. We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art language models on this dataset and find that they struggle to recognize many rhetorical questions.