SlinkET: A Partial Modal Parser for Events

Abstract

We present SlinkET, a parser for identifying contexts of event modality in text developed within the TARSQI (Temporal Awareness and Reasoning Systems for Question Interpretation) research framework. SlinkET is grounded on TimeML, a specification language for capturing temporal and event related information in discourse, which provides an adequate foundation to handle event modality. SlinkET builds on top of a robust event recognizer, and provides each relevant event with a value that specifies the degree of certainty about its factuality; e.g., whether it has happened or holds (factive or counter-factive), whether it is being reported or witnessed by somebody else (evidential), or if it is introduced as a possibility (modal). It is based on well-established technology in the field (namely, finite-state techniques), and informed with corpus-induced knowledge that relies on basic information, such as morphological features, POS, and chunking. SlinkET is under continuing development and it currently achieves a performance ratio of 70% F1-measure.

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