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Annotating Event Mentions in Text with Modality, Focus, and Source Information

Many natural language processing tasks, including information extraction, question answering and recognizing textual entailment, require analysis of the polarity, focus of polarity, tense, aspect, mood and source of the event mentions in a text in addition to its predicate-argument structure analysis. We refer to modality, polarity and other associated information as extended modality. In this paper, we propose a new annotation scheme for representing the extended modality of event mentions in a sentence. Our extended modality consists of the following seven components: Source, Time, Conditional, Primary modality type, Actuality, Evaluation and Focus. We reviewed the literature about extended modality in Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP) and defined appropriate labels of each component. In the proposed annotation scheme, information of extended modality of an event mention is summarized at the core predicate of the event mention for immediate use in NLP applications. We also report on the current progress of our manual annotation of a Japanese corpus of about 50,000 event mentions, showing a reasonably high ratio of inter-annotator agreement.