A Modality Lexicon and its use in Automatic Tagging

This paper describes our resource-building results for an eight-week JHU Human Language Technology Center of Excellence Summer Camp for Applied Language Exploration (SCALE-2009) on Semantically-Informed Machine Translation. Specifically, we describe the construction of a modality annotation scheme, a modality lexicon, and two automated modality taggers that were built using the lexicon and annotation scheme. Our annotation scheme is based on identifying three components of modality: a trigger, a target and a holder. We describe how our modality lexicon was produced semi-automatically, expanding from an initial hand-selected list of modality trigger words and phrases. The resulting expanded modality lexicon is being made publicly available. We demonstrate that one tagger--a structure-based tagger--results in precision around 86% (depending on genre) for tagging of a standard LDC data set. In a machine translation application, using the structure-based tagger to annotate English modalit...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: LREC
• Authors: Kathrin Baker, Michael Bloodgood, Bonnie J. Dorr, Nathaniel W. Filardo, Lori S. Levin, Christine D. Piatko
• Keywords: Annotation Scheme, Education, LREC 2010, Modality Annotation Scheme, Modality Lexicon