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# "I'd rather just go to bed": Understanding Indirect Answers

**Authors:** [Annie Louis](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/annie-louis/), [Dan Roth](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/dan-roth/), Filip Radlinski · **Year:** 2020 · **Venue:** EMNLP 2020 **Link:** [aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.601](https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.601/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) (paper); the Circa data has its own licence, to be checked before any use

[**34** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W3092598446) openalex · 2026-10-18[**38** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/louis-2020-i-d-rather-just-go/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2020.emnlp-main/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.601/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.601.pdf)
- [DOI 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.601](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.601)
- [arXiv 2010.03450](https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.03450)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3092598446)

**Authors (3)**

1. [Annie Louis](https://openalex.org/A5112136402) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4226-252X) · h 22 · 3208 citations · 87 works
2. [Dan Roth](https://openalex.org/A5023802054) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0009-0002-1447-5173) · h 85 · 31311 citations · 731 works
3. [Filip Radlinski](https://openalex.org/A5081692910) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1386-9288) · h 38 · 7329 citations · 110 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-18); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper builds Circa, 34,268 pairs of a polar question and an indirect answer (no *yes*/*no* words), in ten everyday scenarios, written and labelled by crowd workers. Each pair has five judgements of how the asker would read it: yes, probably yes, yes under a condition, no, probably no, in the middle, unsure, other (relaxed: yes 48.5%, no 37.5%, conditional yes 7.5%, middle 2.8%; Fleiss kappa 0.61 strict, 0.76 relaxed). A mined sample of movie dialogues shows only 53% of answers to yes/no questions are direct. BERT models reach 88% (relaxed, 4 classes) and 85% (strict, 6) when the scenario was seen in training and 6–10 points less on an unseen one; the answer alone already gives 82%, the question alone 56%. An off-the-shelf NLI model, used by turning the question into a declarative and reading entailment as yes and contradiction as no, is good on *no* and poor on *yes*.

## Ideas

- I1. Read indirect answers in Mova's frames with the paper's question-to-declarative trick, which Mova already does (`statement_order`): put the yes/no question in statement order, read both into frames, then decide deterministically. The answer frame matches the question frame → yes; same frame negated → no; the same role filled by a different filler («Do you like pizza?» – «I prefer pasta») → no; an `if`/`when`/«depends» clause → conditional yes; a hedge → probably. The decision prints the matched or contrasting role. Use it in `world/src/talk.rs` and for quoted replies in tales; measure on a hand-built dev set from tales before any outside data.
- I2. The answer-only result (82%) means a small cue list carries most of the signal: «I would love to», «Let's do it», «I wish!», «I don't drink», «If I can afford it», «It depends», «I'm not sure yet». Add them as reply cues (yes, no, conditional, unsure) to `prag/data/cues.tsv` with our own phrasing and count how many `agree`/`disagree` lines in the silver they cover.
- I3. Add a `conditional` reading to replies, which the schema lacks: in Circa conditional yes is the third class (7.5%). In tales «If you give me the cheese, I will…» answers a request with a condition. Either a value of a reply qualifier or a flag on the Say frame (`cond` already exists on frames); measure how often the silver's `means` for such lines states a condition.
- I4. The paper's discourse trick (insert *because* or *but* between the declarative question and the answer) matches Mova's `cause` and contrast links: an answer that reads as a reason for the declarative is a yes, one that needs *but* is a no. A rule over the existing link detector, checked on the same dev set as I1.

## For Mova

[38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers/) §9 (questions and answers in dialogue), `33-implicature-and-presupposition.md` §5 (Relevance inferences), `31-speech-acts.md` (agree/disagree). Code: `prag/src/frames.rs` (`statement_order`, frame matching), `world/src/talk.rs`, `prag/data/cues.tsv`. Measures: accuracy on a tale dev set of question–reply pairs (relaxed four classes), agree/disagree F1 in `prag eval`. Circa itself only as a test set, and only if its licence allows.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.601](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.601) · [arXiv 2010.03450](https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.03450)

```
@inproceedings{louis2020i,
  title = {{"I'd rather just go to bed": Understanding Indirect Answers}},
  author = {Louis, Annie and Roth, Dan and Radlinski, Filip},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.601},
  eprint = {2010.03450},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.601}
}
```

- [← previous What is it? Disambiguating the different readings of the pronoun 'it'](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/loaiciga-2017-what-is-it-disambiguating-different/)
- [next → Anticausatives are semantically reflexive in Norwegian, but not in English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/lundquist-2016-anticausatives-are-semantically-reflexive-norwegian/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

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