Using large multi-purpose corpora for specific research questions: discourse phenomena related to wh-questions in the Spoken Dutch Corpus

In this paper, we investigate whether a dataset derived from a multi-purpose corpus such as the Spoken Dutch Corpus may be considered appropriate for developing a taxonomy of wh-questions, and a model of the way in which these questions are integrated in spoken discourse. We compare the results obtained from the Spoken Dutch Corpus with a similar analysis of a large random collection of FAQs from the internet. We find substantial differences between the questions in spoken discourse and FAQs. Therefore, it may not be trivial to use a general purpose corpus as a starting point for developing models for human-computer interaction