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Scare Quotes as Markers of “Questionable” Word Usages and Misalignment in Conversation: An Annotation Study

Summary

Scare quotes signal that a word should not be read literally. A writer may use them to show irony, skepticism, distance, or doubt about a lexical choice. Earlier empirical studies were small, unpublished, and ignored how scare quotes work in dialogue. This paper treats them as explicit signals of potentially problematic word usages that could cause semantic misunderstanding or disagreement between interlocutors.

The authors built SQuiC (Scare Quotes in Conversation), the first large, publicly released annotation of quotation functions. Its source is the Winning Arguments corpus of r/ChangeMyView debates, which already carries Word Meaning Negotiation (WMN) labels from NeWMe. The quoted spans are short, up to three words. They are classified as scare (S), non-scare (N), or both (B) using a schema based on prior literature and real data.

The analysis shows that scare quotes often mark contested usages and are frequently used to challenge or criticize other speakers' wording. Non-scare, meta-linguistic quotes, in contrast, often appear in explicit attempts to reach lexico-semantic alignment. The authors also test LLMs as annotators. The resource supports research on conversational alignment and on detecting problematic word usages.

Key points

  • Source data: Winning Arguments (Tan et al., 2016), drawn from r/ChangeMyView between 2013 and 2015. The authors kept 586 complete conversations, about 3M words and 27k posts.
  • Regex extraction of single and double quotation marks around spans of up to three words, excluding cited Reddit material, produced 9,233 matches from 5,200 posts, about 19% of all posts.
  • The annotation schema has three classes: S (scare), N (non-scare: meta-linguistic use, citation, terminology, titles, emphasis) and B (both).
  • The annotations are linked to NeWMe WMN annotations, so quote functions can be studied alongside word meaning negotiation.
  • LLMs were evaluated in 2-class and 3-class settings with class definitions at three verbosity levels and few-shot example sets.
  • Annotations, guidelines and code are available at github.com/ainagari/scare-quotes.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/4g6qf5k2z4pw

@inproceedings{soler2026scare,
  title = {{Scare Quotes as Markers of “Questionable” Word Usages and Misalignment in Conversation: An Annotation Study}},
  author = {Soler, Aina Garí and Huaco, Juan Carlos Zevallos and Labeau, Matthieu and Clavel, Chloé},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/4g6qf5k2z4pw},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4g6qf5k2z4pw}
}

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