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The prosody of questions in natural discourse

2002· article· en· W135244556 on OpenAlexaff
Nancy Hedberg, Juan Manuel Sosa

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicNatural Language Processing Techniques
Canadian institutionsSimon Fraser University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsProsodyNatural (archaeology)Computer scienceLinguisticsNatural language processingNatural languageArtificial intelligenceSpeech recognitionHistoryPhilosophy

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

For this paper, we examined a corpus of 73 wh-questions and yes/no questions, both positive and negative, from natural discourse.We found that the locus of interrogation (the initial auxiliary in yes/no questions or the initial wh-word in whquestions) most frequently gets an L+H* pitch accent, especially in wh-questions and negative yes/no questions.Positive yes/no questions are more variable, and included 40% unstressed auxiliaries.Nuclear stress was primarily falling in wh-questions, as expected; but positive yes/no questions were almost twice as often falling or level as rising, contrary to expectation.Finally, the topic of the question turned out to be marked primarily with some version of an H* accent rather than an L+H* accent, and the focus with L+H* rather than some variant of H*, contrary to predictions in the literature. CommentA predication, P, is the comment of a sentence, S, iff, in using S the speaker intends P to be assessed relative to the topic of S. FocusThat part of the linguistic expression that realizes the comment.What is interesting about these definitions is that questions and other speech acts as well as statements can be said to have information (topic-focus) structure that doesn't necessarily coincide with any particular syntactic distinction.It is possible that there could be a divergence between the semantic

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.008
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.002
Threshold uncertainty score0.008

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.008
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.001
Open science0.0000.001
Research integrity0.0010.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0020.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.010
GPT teacher head0.282
Teacher spread0.272 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designObservational
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations51
Published2002
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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