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home / papers / 2026 / POLAR: A Corpus of Questions, Responses and Argumentation in Polish Political Radio Discourse

POLAR: A Corpus of Questions, Responses and Argumentation in Polish Political Radio Discourse

Summary

Political interviews are hard to analyse, both by hand and computationally. Interrogative sentences there often do something other than seek information, such as accusing, challenging or signalling an opinion. They can also act as hidden premises or conclusions in an argument. Argument Mining resources are mostly English and monological, and dialogue corpora such as QT30 and US2016 use coarse question taxonomies. They also do not model how questions relate to answers or what a question implicitly asserts. No comparable resource existed for Polish.

The authors built POLAR from orthographic transcripts of Polish political radio interviews broadcast after the October 2023 elections. They annotated it manually at three layers:

  • questions treated as speech acts,
  • the types of responses they receive,
  • argumentative structures containing interrogatives.

For the third layer, annotators spelled out the implied assertive content of each such interrogative. The work draws on Inference Anchoring Theory (IAT) and the response typology of Bull and Mayer. Nearly a quarter of interrogatives turned out not to request information. A gold-standard version, baseline classifiers and LLM-based evaluations show the resource is useful for linguistic theory and NLP alike.

Key points

  • Data: POLAR contains 21 interviews with prominent Polish politicians from RMF FM, Radio Zet and Polish Radio, recorded between December 2023 and March 2024. This amounts to 593 minutes of audio, 119,340 tokens and 8,980 sentences.
  • Question annotation: Questions get a binary label: with or without an information-request component. This departs from the finer taxonomies used in IAT corpora.
  • Main findings: 23% of interrogative sentences do not function as genuine information-seeking questions. 13% serve as components of argumentative structures.
  • Novel annotation step: For argumentative interrogatives, annotators wrote out the implicit assertion and marked its role as premise or conclusion. This combines speech act analysis with reconstruction of implicatures.
  • Released resources: The release includes annotation guidelines, a gold-standard corpus, baseline classification experiments and LLM evaluations. The supplied text omits the experiments section, so specific scores are not given here.

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

Topics: Discourse analysis

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/5hu4iymus53n

@inproceedings{ziembicki2026polar,
  title = {{POLAR: A Corpus of Questions, Responses and Argumentation in Polish Political Radio Discourse}},
  author = {Ziembicki, Daniel and Zwierzchowska, Aleksandra and Sobol, Ewelina and Przerada, Katarzyna Anna},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/5hu4iymus53n},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/5hu4iymus53n}
}

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