Yuan Zhuang author Ellen Riloff author 2020-jul text Association for Computational Linguistics Online conference publication Social media posts often contain questions, but many of the questions are rhetorical and do not seek information. Our work studies the problem of distinguishing rhetorical and information-seeking questions on Twitter. Most work has focused on features of the question itself, but we hypothesize that the prior context plays a role too. This paper introduces a new dataset containing questions in tweets paired with their prior tweets to provide context. We create classification models to assess the difficulty of distinguishing rhetorical and information-seeking questions, and experiment with different properties of the prior context. Our results show that the prior tweet and topic features can improve performance on this task. zhuang-riloff-2020-exploring https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.acl-srw.41 2020-jul 306 312