Give me a listing of the grammatical hallmarks of a question.  (What
makes a sentence a question?)  I need the answer in order to be able
to have a computer recognize a typed sentence as a question

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Request for Question Clarification by sublime1-ga on 10 Feb 2006 18:41 PST

tholzel...

Beyond the obvious characteristics of containing who, where, what,
why, when, can, how, would, should, could, and similar keywords, as
well as a question mark at the end, I'm not sure what other hallmarks
might apply and be recognizable by a computer.

Can you elaborate?

sublime1-ga

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Clarification of Question by tholzel-ga on 15 Feb 2006 05:33 PST

Beyond the key words, who, what, etc., is there a structure to
sentences that are questions, e.g., questions often start with a verb
("Can I...")

My Word spelling and grammar check won't automatically flag a question
that ends with a period, but when I scroll over the text and click on
the checker, it will flag the last word and period and remove the flag
when I change the period to a question mark.  Functioned with
questions starting with "how" etc. and also with a verb as the first
word, also with a preceding clause.

A question should end with a question mark; and any reasonably
intelligent computer should be able to recognise that. If, however,
the "question" doesn't end with a question mark - due, for example, to
the weak grammar of the questioner - then you may need to utilise a
super-intelligent computer, aka a human being.

tholzel,

In linguistics and grammar, the "interrogative mood" is used for
asking questions. In English, this is indicated by word order.
Interrogative pronouns, sometimes called "wh-words" ("who," "what,"
"which," "where," "when," etc., but also odd ones like "how"), appear
at the beginning of the sentence. The normal word order of a sentence
in English is SVO (subject, verb, object), as in "She eats apples." To
form a question, the object ("apples") is replaced by a wh-word, as in
"What does she eat?" The wh-word is followed by an auxiliary verb
(including a form of "to do") and then the subject.

Hope this helps.
apophenia

In order to recognise yes/no questions, which are not as easy to
recognise as wh-questions, consider that in English they must start
with an auxiliary verb (be, have, will, do) or a modal verb (can, may,
must, shall). In the case of sentences that already contain such a
verb, the verb is simply put at the beginning of the sentence, before
the subject. In sentences that do not yet contain such a verb, a form
of the verb "to do" is added.

Be sure to include the possibility of a verb adjusted in person or
tense, for example "were" instead of "be", or "does" instead of "do".
Also consider that "not" might be part of this first word, which
sometimes leads to irregular forms, e. g. instead of "Will you come
with us?", you get "Won't you come with us?".

This is all rather complicated, so if at all possible, base your
assumption on the punctuation. Or work on an easy language like
French, Chinese or Esperanto.