Questions in the TED-Multilingual Discourse Bank and the development of an annotation scheme

Abstract In this paper, we analyze question-answer pairs and stand-alone questions within the spoken discourse of TED Talks, specifically focusing on the TED-Multilingual Discourse Bank. Our aim is to reveal various characteristics of questions through an annotation approach. We have developed a taxonomy, referred to as the TAQ-TED, to categorize types of questions and examine their information transfer and dialogue control functions, drawing on the Dynamic Interpretation Theory++ taxonomy of dialogue acts and their attribution in accordance with the Penn Discourse Treebank annotation guidelines. We outline the taxonomy, present our annotation results, and provide a preliminary cross-linguistic analysis comparing English questions with their Turkish and Portuguese translations. The TAQ-TED represents a promising initial framework for annotating questions in monologic discourse across multiple languages.