PROVIDE AN EXTENSIVE MODEL THAT INTERPRETSHUMAN’, THERE IS A SUB...

1999) provide an extensive model that interprets

human’, there is a substantial amount of gray area

and generates indirect answers to polar questions.

between the clear instances (babies) and the clear

They propose a logical inference model which

non-instances (adults). This is the source of un-

makes use of discourse plans and coherence rela-

certainty in (3), in which B’s children fall into the

tions to infer categorical answers. However, to ad-

gray area.

equately interpret indirect answers, the uncertainty

(3) A: Are your kids little?

inherent in some answers needs to be captured (de

Marneffe et al., 2009). While a straightforward

B: I have a seven year-old and a ten

‘yes’ or ‘no’ response is clear in some indirect an-

year-old.

swers, such as in (1), the intended answer is less

certain in other cases (2):

¹

3 Corpus description

(1) A: Do you think that’s a good idea, that we

Since indirect answers are likely to arise in in-

just begin to ignore these numbers?

terviews, to gather instances of question–answer

B: I think it’s an excellent idea.

pairs involving gradable modifiers (which will

serve to evaluate the learning techniques), we use

(2) A: Is he qualified?

online CNN interview transcripts from five dif-

B: I think he’s young.

ferent shows aired between 2000 and 2008 (An-

In (2), it might be that the answerer does not

derson Cooper, Larry King Live, Late Edition,

Lou Dobbs Tonight, The Situation Room). We

know about qualifications or does not want to talk

also searched the Switchboard Dialog Act corpus

about these directly, and therefore shifts the topic

slightly. As proposed by Zeevat (1994) in his work

(Jurafsky et al., 1997). We used regular expres-

sions and manual filtering to find examples of two-

on partial answers, the speaker’s indirect answer

might indicate that he is deliberately leaving the

utterance dialogues in which the question and the

original question only partially addressed, while

reply contain some kind of gradable modifier.

giving a fully resolving answer to another one.