LogosLink User's Manual · LogosLink version 2.0.0

Question Set Elements

Question set elements are the atomic components of a question set.

There are several kinds of agency model elements. In addition, question set elements are connected via multiple kinds of relationships, so that they can convey the complexity of the associated question set.

Details

There are several kinds of question set elements, which are described in the following sections.

Every question set element, no matter of what kind, has an identifier, which unequivocally distinguishes it from other elements.

Questions

Questions are queries posed to the discourse with the aim to help discover the beliefs, desires and intentions of the associated agents.

Some sample questions could be:

What terms are emphasised by each speaker?
What are the major cognitive metaphors used by each speaker?
What agents are mentioned in the text?
What is bad for each agent but is omitted by each speaker?
What strategies are used by each speaker to defend their main thesis?

Questions can be unscoped, that is, they require a single response for the text as a whole. Other questions may be scoped to subject or object speakers as well as object agents and entity lists. For example, a question like "What does each agent possess that others lack, according to each speaker?" is scoped to both subject speakers and object agents. This means that, when responding this question, you need to compose a separate response part for each combination of speakers and agents in the text. For example, if your agency model contains two speakers and refers to three agents, a response to this question would contain six response parts.

Furthermore, there are different kinds of questions:

Text, which are responded by entering a piece of free text.
Itemised, which are responded by entering one or more brief text items.
Option List, which are responded by selecting one or more items from a pre-defined option list.
Agent, which are responded by selecting one or more agents from the embedded context.

Question groups

Question groups are collections of related questions.

It is usually a good idea to group questions according to their degree of interpretativeness, from the more objective or less interpretative, to the more subjective or interpretative. You can nest question groups inside other groups, so you can organise the questions in your question set in any way that you see fit.

Entity lists

Entity lists are thematic containers for entities mentioned in the discourse.

Some questions may ask about central entities, for example. Other questions may be scoped to entities of a particular kind, such as places or historical periods. If you are interested in asking questions about places or historical periods, then you would need to add entity lists for these to your question set.

Note that entity lists in question sets are empty, that is, they don't contain any entities, because the entities that populate them will be determined for each particular text that is analysed. The question set simply defines an entity list for a particular kind of entities so that the analyser that then carries our agency analysis on a text can define the ncessary entities.

Further information

A complete description of the different question set elements doesn't fit here. Please refer to the IAT/ML Technical Specification if you are interested in a complete technical description.