Yes/No Questions and Answers in the Map Task Corpus

We analyze question-answer pairs in a variety of ways, for three different kinds of yes/no questions. We find that the classification of yes/no questions described in (Carletta et al., 1995) for the Edinburgh map task corpus correlates well with whether a response will be a bare yes or no, a yes or no plus additional speech, or just speech without an overt yes or no. Correlation with responses described as “direct” or “indirect” is less good. We also find that the strength of a question’s expectation for a YES response correlates with the move type, the form of the response, and lexical yes choices; and that the move type correlates with the form of the question and with turn-taking schema

Yes/No Questions and Answers in the Map Task Corpus

We analyze question-answer pairs in a variety of ways, for three different kinds of yes/no questions. We find that the classification of yes/no questions described in (Carletta et al., 1995) for the Edinburgh map task corpus correlates well with whether a response will be a bare yes or no, a yes or no plus additional speech, or just speech without an overt yes or no. Correlation with responses described as "direct" or "indirect" is less good. We also find that the strength of a question's expectation for a YES response correlates with the move type, the form of the response, and lexical yes choices; and that the move type correlates with the form of the question and with turn-taking schema. Introduction While it may at first seem fairly straightforward that the answer to a yes/no question should be yes or no, or some variant of these terms, it has often been pointed out that acceptable responses may not contain such a term (e.g., (Stenstr om, 1984; Green and Carberry, 1992; Green a..