  Questions play a prominent role in social interactions, performing rhetorical
functions that go beyond that of simple informational exchange. The surface
form of a question can signal the intention and background of the person asking
it, as well as the nature of their relation with the interlocutor. While the
informational nature of questions has been extensively examined in the context
of question-answering applications, their rhetorical aspects have been largely
understudied.
  In this work we introduce an unsupervised methodology for extracting surface
motifs that recur in questions, and for grouping them according to their latent
rhetorical role. By applying this framework to the setting of question sessions
in the UK parliament, we show that the resulting typology encodes key aspects
of the political discourse---such as the bifurcation in questioning behavior
between government and opposition parties---and reveals new insights into the
effects of a legislator's tenure and political career ambitions.
