English

What Do You Mean `Why?': Resolving Sluices in Conversations

Computation and Language 2019-11-22 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

In conversation, we often ask one-word questions such as `Why?' or `Who?'. Such questions are typically easy for humans to answer, but can be hard for computers, because their resolution requires retrieving both the right semantic frames and the right arguments from context. This paper introduces the novel ellipsis resolution task of resolving such one-word questions, referred to as sluices in linguistics. We present a crowd-sourced dataset containing annotations of sluices from over 4,000 dialogues collected from conversational QA datasets, as well as a series of strong baseline architectures.

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.09478,
  title  = {What Do You Mean `Why?': Resolving Sluices in Conversations},
  author = {Victor Petrén Bach Hansen and Anders Søgaard},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.09478},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Accepted at the 34TH AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2020)

R2 v1 2026-06-23T12:23:23.309Z