Papers › What Do You Mean `Why?': Resolving Sluices in Conversations

What Do You Mean `Why?': Resolving Sluices in Conversations

21 Nov 2019arXiv:1911.09478archive 2025-07-28

Victor Petrén Bach Hansen, Anders Søgaard

In conversation, we often ask one-word questions such as `Why?' or `Who?'. Such questions are typically easy for humans to answer, but can be hard for computers, because their resolution requires retrieving both the right semantic frames and the right arguments from context. This paper introduces the novel ellipsis resolution task of resolving such one-word questions, referred to as sluices in linguistics. We present a crowd-sourced dataset containing annotations of sluices from over 4,000 dialogues collected from conversational QA datasets, as well as a series of strong baseline architectures.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

vpetren/conv_sluice_resolution officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections