Yes we can!? Annotating English modal verbs

This paper presents an annotation scheme for English modal verbs together with sense-annotated data from the news domain. We describe our annotation scheme and discuss problematic cases for modality annotation based on the inter-annotator agreement during the annotation. Furthermore, we present experiments on automatic sense tagging, showing that our annotations do provide a valuable training resource for NLP systems.

[1]  Modality and Language , 2022 .

[2]  Patrick Blackburn,et al.  The Language of Time: A Reader , 2006, Computational Linguistics.

[3]  Katrin Erk,et al.  A Powerful and Versatile XML Format for Representing Role-semantic Annotation , 2004, LREC.

[4]  Yuji Matsumoto,et al.  Annotating Event Mentions in Text with Modality, Focus, and Source Information , 2010, LREC.

[5]  Christine D. Piatko,et al.  A Modality Lexicon and its use in Automatic Tagging , 2010, LREC.

[6]  James Pustejovsky,et al.  The Specification Language TimeML , 2005, The Language of Time - A Reader.

[7]  James Pustejovsky,et al.  A factuality profiler for eventualities in text , 2008 .

[8]  Ted Briscoe,et al.  Weakly Supervised Learning for Hedge Classification in Scientific Literature , 2007, ACL.

[9]  Weiwei Guo,et al.  Committed Belief Annotation and Tagging , 2009, Linguistic Annotation Workshop.

[10]  Jan Svartvik,et al.  A __ comprehensive grammar of the English language , 1988 .

[11]  N. Shepherd.  Cambridge Grammar of English , 2007 .

[12]  Roser Morante,et al.  Learning the Scope of Hedge Cues in Biomedical Texts , 2009, BioNLP@HLT-NAACL.

[13]  Claire Cardie,et al.  Annotating Expressions of Opinions and Emotions in Language , 2005, Lang. Resour. Evaluation.

[14]  Dan Klein,et al.  Improved Inference for Unlexicalized Parsing , 2007, NAACL.

[15]  K. Hengeveld.  Mood and modality , 2004 .

[16]  Douglas Biber,et al.  Using corpora to explore linguistic variation , 2002 .

[17]  James Pustejovsky,et al.  FactBank: a corpus annotated with event factuality , 2009, Lang. Resour. Evaluation.

[18]  Graeme Kennedy.  4. Variation in the distribution of modal verbs in the British National Corpus , 2002 .