Question Statement
A Question Statement is a statement that expresses an information need.
- Context:
- It can range from (typically) being a Linguistically-expressed Question (with an interrogative sentence) to being a Logic-expressed Question (such as a structured language query).
- It can range from being an Unanswered Question to being an Answered Question.
- It can range from being an Unambiguous Question to being an Ambiguous Question.
- It can range from being an Informal Question to being a Formally-specified Question.
- It can range from being a Closed-Ended Question to being an Open-Ended Question.
- It can range from being an Under-Specified Question to being a Well-Specified Question to being an Over-Specified Question (depending on the coreference to the information need).
- It can range from being a General Knowledge Question to being a Domain-Specific Question (like a product-related question).
- It can be an input to a Question Answering Act (of some question answering task that produces some question response).
- …
- Example(s):
- a Multiple Choice Question:, such as “The large ball crashed right through the table because it was made of styrofoam. What was made of styrofoam: the ball or the table?”
- a Factoid question, such as “How many calories are there in a Big Mac?” (for the information need of I wonder how many calories there as in a Big Mac?).
- a List Question, such as “List the names of chewing gums.” (for the information need of I wonder what the names of all chewing gums are?)
- a Definition Question, such as “What is a golden parachute?” (for the information need of I wonder what a golden parachute is?)
- a Query Question, such as: “Is there any more ice cream?” (for the informational need of I wonder if there is ice cream?).
- a State-of-the-World Question, such as “Did you finish the ice cream?” (for the informational need of I wonder if she finished the ice cream?).
- a Research Question, such as: “does P=NP?" or “When can semantic-role labeling help with question-answering tasks”.
- a Rhetorical Question, such as: “Is that a pseudo-assertion?”.
- …
- Counter-Example(s):
- an Question Answer.
- a Search Query.
- an Assertion Statement.
- a Belief Statement.
- an Assumption.
- See: Information, Inversion (Grammar), Imperative Mood, Mental Event.
References
2014
- http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/questions/
- The philosophy of language since Frege has emphasized propositions and declarative sentences, but it is clear that questions and interrogative sentences are just as important. Scientific investigation and explanation proceed in part through the posing and answering of questions, and human-computer interaction is often structured in terms of queries and answers.
After going over some preliminaries we will focus on three lines of work on questions: one located at the intersection of philosophy of language and formal semantics, focusing on the semantics of what Belnap and Steel (1976) call elementary questions; a second located at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of science, focusing on why-questions and the notion of explanation; and a third located at the intersection of philosophy of language and epistemology, focusing on embedded or indirect questions.
- The philosophy of language since Frege has emphasized propositions and declarative sentences, but it is clear that questions and interrogative sentences are just as important. Scientific investigation and explanation proceed in part through the posing and answering of questions, and human-computer interaction is often structured in terms of queries and answers.
- (Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/question Retrieved:2014-2-12.
- A question is a linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or the request made using such an expression. The information requested may be provided in the form of an answer.
Questions have developed a range of uses that go beyond the simple eliciting of information from another party. Rhetorical questions, for example, are used to make a point, and are not expected to be answered. Many languages have special grammatical forms for questions (for example, in the English sentence "Are you happy?", the inversion of the subject you and the verb are shows it to be a question rather than a statement). However questions can also be asked without using these interrogative grammatical structures – for example one may use an imperative, as in "Tell me your name".
For detailed information about the grammar of question formation, see Interrogative, and for English specifically, .
- A question is a linguistic expression used to make a request for information, or the request made using such an expression. The information requested may be provided in the form of an answer.