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I tried with basic thing like whether question starts with who/what/.. but there are a lot many sentences which do not start with interrogative words but still demands an answer like "hotels in singapore".

I have boiled down the logic that the sentences that are not providing some information but are incomplete in that sense, could fall in the interrogative class only. Are there some references for this topic?

Sir Cornflakes
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user3614506
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    Usually one tells by the intonation at the end. In print, a question mark usually indicates the same intonation. – jlawler May 08 '14 at 03:01
  • Is "hotels in singapore" really asking for an answer ? I think it can be : If the prosody is the one of a question. If the setup tells you so: non english speaker tourist pointing a map. If you are typing this in a search engine... But without extra context I would say it is not asking for an answer. – Ugo May 08 '14 at 09:27
  • for that matter consider it as if it is typed in search engine and it is asking for answer. – user3614506 May 08 '14 at 12:59
  • @user3614506 In the case of search engine queries it is not a linguistic feature which denotes the utterance as interrogative but rather the context in which the utterance takes place. I.E. people typically only use search engines when requesting information. – acattle May 10 '14 at 11:18
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    Please edit your question to indicate whether you are interested specifically in English, or across languages generally; and tag appropriately. – hippietrail May 12 '14 at 05:46
  • Tonal languages of (South) East Asia do not use a rising tone to indicate a question. Mandarin Chinese uses the word "ma" with the neutral tone to end questions that don't contain a question word. "Ma" with the rising tone has meanings such as "hemp", "sesame", and "numb". – hippietrail May 12 '14 at 05:54

3 Answers3

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There is no mechanical way to determine the communicative intent of a sentence with 100% certainty.

Things like word order, word choice, intonation, punctuation, etc. will help but all sentences are used within a broader communicative context to achieve various speech acts. Sometimes, these are clearly signalled. Other times, they require a complex human understanding of the situation in order to be able to fully parse what's going on. And, remember, often, even humans misunderstand each other. How often do you hear people answer rhetorical questions.

Take the simple 'How are you?' Most often, it is used as part of a greeting and it does not require an answer. But very often it does. But speakers may have to elaborate. 'I really mean it.', etc. Or people will follow up a question with - 'This is a rhetorical question.' You will even hear things like 'This is a rhetorical question but I'm going to answer it anyway.'

Dominik Lukes
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You can develop a Classifier using Stanford Column Data Classifier to solve this issue.

http://nlp.stanford.edu/nlp/javadoc/javanlp/edu/stanford/nlp/classify/ColumnDataClassifier.html

Develop a Dataset which contains two types of sentences, "questions" and "information" according to the training file format of Stanford Column Classifier. Next, train the Classifier. Then, use the trained classifier to interrogate on arbitrary sentence you would like to determine as a Question or Information.

Madhawa Vidanapathirana
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In many versions of the English language, most times the intonation at the end of the statement is usually the indication of a statement being an interrogation. There is usually a high pitched tone at the end of the question; when it's asked sincerely.

p.s: Sarcasm may sometimes leave a dipping tone at the end of the question. For example "You leaving." ...when asked by someone who does not expect you to leave.

Igbanam
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