Rhetorical Questions in LLM Representations: A Linear Probing Study (2026.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Rhetorical questions are asked not to seek information, but to persuade or signal stance . how large language models internally represent rhetorical questions remains unclear . |
| Approach: | They analyze rhetorical questions in LLM representations using linear probes on two social-media datasets with different discourse contexts. |
| Outcome: | The results show that rhetorical signals emerge early and are most stably captured by last-token representations. |
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