1. Annotating Modality Marjorie McShane and Sergei Nirenburg UMBC An analyst will benefit from being able to distinguish what Al-Qaeda can/might/is trying to dofrom can’t, didn’t, should, shouldn’t dofrom evaluative judgments of its actions. 1.Al-Qaeda has not infiltrated the CIA. 2.Al-Qaeda might infiltrate the CIA. 3.Al-Qaeda can infiltrate the CIA. 4.Al-Qaeda cannot infiltrate the CIA. 5.It is unlikely that Al-Qaeda has infiltrated the CIA. 6.Al-Qaeda should infiltrate the CIA. 7.Al-Qaeda should not infiltrate the CIA. 8.Al-Qaeda is trying to infiltrate the CIA 9.Al-Qaeda is not trying to infiltrate the CIA. 10.Al-Qaeda wants to infiltrate the CIA. 11.Al-Qaeda does not want to infiltrate the CIA. 12.It is appalling that Al-Qaeda might infiltrate the CIA.

2. Modality and Inferencing Volitive: Sheikh Mohammed… announced … "we want to make Dubai a new trading center.” Dubai is not, at the time of speech, a new trading center Obligative: The location should be away from airports and main highways. The location should be but it may not be (so a location near an airport could be an Al-Queda hideout) Permissive: Flights are not permitted into Iraq. Flights into Iraq still could be taking place - there is no indication that the potential modality is 0. Epistemic: He is not telling them to disband and regulate their weapons. This is one of many ways of negating a proposition; also: It is not the case that… etc.; all must be recognized.

3. Application-specific examples of the utility of recognizing modalities 1.Knowledge extraction/summarization: Extract and return only those propositions that are or are not in the scope of a given type of modality (volitive, potential, permissive, obligative, etc.): e.g., everything some organization should do, cannot do, etc. 2.Q/A: Answer questions that ask about a specific type of entity or event 3.Visualization: Color-code or otherwise highlight search results by modality type 4.Profiling: Create entity or event profiles by modality type 5.Translation: Detect and render paraphrases of modal expressions 6.Reasoning: Correctly constrain inferences

4. Modality and Semantic Analysis: annotating semantic structures, not strings, helps to: –Disambiguate “I should think so” “Take it from me - I should know” –Treat compositional ways of expressing modality I have a feeling that doing this would be a bad idea (belief; evaluative) –Capture paraphrases when modality scopes over modality We do not permit this (permissive 0 or permissive 1 scoped over by epistemic 0) –Modality scopes over several propositions The ditch should be 30 centimeters deep and 20 centimeters wide. [‘should’ scopes over two properties with their domains and ranges]