Understand
Asking questions is a pervasive human activity, but little is understood about what makes them difficult to answer.
- An analysis of a pair of large databases, of New York Times crosswords and questions from the quiz-show Jeopardy, establishes two orthogonal dimensions of question difficulty: obscurity (the rarity of the answer) and opacity (the indirectness of question cues, operationalized with word2vec).
- The importance of opacity, and the role of synergistic information in resolving it, suggests that accounts of difficulty in terms of prior expectations captures only a part of the question-asking process.
- A further regression analysis shows the presence of additional dimensions to question-asking: question complexity, the answer's local network density, cue intersection, and the presence of signal words.