Information-seeking questions and rhetorical questions in social media

Abstract

This study examines the distinctive features of information-seeking questions and rhetorical questions from the semantic and syntactic perspectives. Corpus data shows that rhetorical questions (60.3%) are more frequently used in social media than information-seeking questions (39.7%). Of the two types of questions, 94% of rhetorical questions are found to evoke emotions, while only 23% of information-seeking questions are associated with emotions. It indicates that rhetorical questions are a rather productive means of expressing emotions. In view of this, we explore the characteristics of the two types of questions in terms of their lexical choices and syntactic behaviors. Various linguistic cues and syntactic structures are proposed to distinguish the differences between information-seeking questions and rhetorical questions. It is believed that the study will be directly beneficial to the identification of rhetorical questions and help enhance the existing automatic emotion classification system