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Not a Simple Yes or No: Uncertainty in Indirect Answers

Summary

Answers to yes/no questions are often indirect. Sometimes the reply only makes "yes" or "no" more or less likely without settling the question. Earlier plan-based, purely logical models, such as Green and Carberry's, cannot weigh such uncertain or conflicting evidence. The authors study these indirect question–answer pairs (IQAPs) both empirically and computationally.

They took polar questions and their replies from the Switchboard Dialog Act Corpus and checked them by hand for indirect answers. From these data they built a typology along two dimensions:

  • whether the reply fully or only partially resolves the question;
  • what kind of knowledge the inference requires (logical, linguistic, or common ground/world).

They then encoded representative cases as Markov logic networks, which attach weights to first-order logic formulas. In this form the model yields graded probabilities instead of categorical verdicts. Two kinds of reasoning illustrate this. One is a composite relation such as "raise", which is supported but not entailed by its parts. The other is reasoning that depends on speaker beliefs, where the same facts lead to different conclusions under different weightings.

The work shows why dialogue systems need probabilistic inference to interpret replies that are neither a clear yes nor a clear no.

Key points

  • Data: 200 five-minute Switchboard conversations produced 623 direct yes/no questions (tag "qy"). Tag questions, disjunctive questions, and questions not really needing an answer were excluded.
  • 88 responses were IQAPs, about 14% of answers. This is close to Stenström's (1984) 13%, while Hockey et al. (1997) report 38% for task-oriented dialogue.
  • Answer tags were grouped into six categories. The largest are direct yes/no/agree answers (341) and statements (143), followed by affirmative non-yes and negative non-no answers (91).
  • The typology adds a new split between fully-resolving answers (e.g., over-answers, entailment via world or lexical knowledge) and partially-resolving ones (e.g., vague gradable adjectives like "little", composite relations, beliefs in the common ground).
  • In the MLN example, the probability of Raise(K,Cat) depends on the evidence (both constraints weighted 1.0):
    • with both SpendTime and Own present, it is 0.88;
    • with only SpendTime present, it drops to 0.78.

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

Cited by

13 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 4 of them have a page here, 9 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{marneffe2009not,
  title = {{Not a Simple Yes or No: Uncertainty in Indirect Answers}},
  author = {Marneffe, Marie-Catherine de and Grimm, Scott and Potts, Christopher},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the SIGDIAL 2009 Conference},
  year = {2009},
  doi = {10.3115/1708376.1708396},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1708376.1708396}
}

References

19 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. James F. Allen and C. Raymond Perrault. 1980. Analyzing intention in utterances. Artificial Intelligence, 15:143–178. ↗
  2. Nicholas Asher and Alex Lascarides. 2003. Logics of Conversation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. find
  3. Dwight Bolinger. 1978. Yes–no questions are not alternative questions. In Henry Hiz, editor, Questions, pages 87–105. D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland. ↗
  4. Herbert H. Clark. 1979. Responding to indirect speech acts. Cognitive Psychology, 11:430–477. ↗
  5. Nancy Green and Sandra Carberry. 1992. Conversational implicatures in indirect replies. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 64– 71, Newark, Delaware, USA, June. Association for Computational Linguistics. find our card
  6. Nancy Green and Sandra Carberry. 1994. A hybrid reasoning model for indirect answers. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 58–65, Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA, June. Association for Computational Linguistics. find our card
  7. Jeroen Groenendijk and Martin Stokhof. 1984. Studies in the Semantics of Questions and the Pragmatics of Answers. Ph.D. thesis, University of Amsterdam. find
  8. Beth Ann Hockey, Deborah Rossen-Knill, Beverly Spejewski, Matthew Stone, and Stephen Isard. 1997. Can you predict answers to Y/N questions? Yes, No and Stuff. In Proceedings of Eurospeech 1997. find
  9. Daniel Jurafsky, Elizabeth Shriberg, and Debra Biasca. 1997. Switchboard SWBD-DAMSL shallow-discourse-function annotation coders manual, draft 13. Technical Report 97-02, University of Colorado, Boulder Institute of Cognitive Science. find
  10. Christopher Kennedy. 2007. Vagueness and grammar: The semantics of relative and absolute gradable adjectives. Linguistics and Philosophy, 30(1):1–45. ↗
  11. Stanley Kok, Marc Sumner, Matthew Richardson, Parag Singla, Hoifung Poon, Daniel Lowd, Jue Wang, and Pedro Domingos. 2009. The Alchemy system for statistical relational AI. Technical report, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA. find
  12. C. Raymond Perrault and James F. Allen. 1980. A plan-based analysis of indirect speech acts. American Journal of Computational Linguistics, 6(3-4):167–182. ↗ our card
  13. Anita M. Pomerantz. 1984. Agreeing and disagreeing with assessment: Some features of preferred/dispreferred turn shapes. In J. M. Atkinson and J. Heritage, editors, Structure of Social Action: Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge University Press. find
  14. Matt Richardson and Pedro Domingos. 2006. Markov logic networks. Machine Learning, 62(1-2):107– 136. ↗
  15. Craige Roberts. 1996. Information structure: Towards an integrated formal theory of pragmatics. In Jae Hak Yoon and Andreas Kathol, editors, OSU Working Papers in Linguistics, volume 49: Papers in Semantics, pages 91–136. The Ohio State University Department of Linguistics, Columbus, OH. Revised 1998. find
  16. Robert van Rooy. 2003. Questioning to resolve decision problems. Linguistics and Philosophy, 26(6):727–763. find
  17. Emanuel A. Schegloff, Gail Jefferson, and Harvey Sacks. 1977. The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation. Language, 53:361–382. ↗
  18. Anna-Brita Stenström. 1984. Questions and responses in English conversation. In Claes Schaar and Jan Svartvik, editors, Lund Studies in English 68, Malmö Sweden. CWK Gleerup. find
  19. Henk Zeevat. 1994. Questions and exhaustivity in update semantics. In Harry Bunt, Reinhard Muskens, and Gerrit Rentier, editors, Proceedings of the International Workshop on Computational Semantics, pages 211–221. ITK, Tilburg. find

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