Annotating Modality Marjorie McShane and Sergei Nirenburg UMBC An analyst will benefit from being able to distinguish, say, 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.

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.

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

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]

Features of Modality modality type … scope … value … attributed-to

Modalities or not? Thorny ones –We don’t use saliency for ‘importance’ Saliency is for theme/rheme and focus of questions Importance will be handled by an attribute (not included yet; late-stage decision not to use saliency) –Interestingness, beauty: evaluative or not? We said ‘no’, making these attributes instead

Grain size of Values {0,1} for all modalities Any decimal, range, or inequality, currently permitted, as for attributes. Interannotator agreement is a bit problematic with this large choice space. Would it be useful to constrain the choices further? –Limit selection to 0,.3,.5,.7, 1? –Permit or don’t permit ranges? (.8 vs. ><.7.9) – etc.

Epistemic (incl. polarity) Epistemic for polarity Reed refused to back down demanding the Republican led intelligence committee finish a long awaited report on whether the Bush administration twisted intelligence. However, understanding polarity is not as simple as detecting keywords. For example, whereas He didn’t not agree means He agreed, the following sentence does not mean Baghdad does recognize fly zones. Baghdad does not recognize these no-fly zones for which no international resolution has been passed. Epistemic apart from polarity Seems to, might, could, …

Belief What do you think the time frame is on this? Epistemic vs. belief: we decided on separating them, making each a different modality (I think that he probably went home: belief.8 scoping over the proposition, which has epistemic.8). However, there are cases when either could work; no perfect solution; we might remerge them.

Volitive During his four days in Iraq, Hall said he wanted to investigate reports from relief agencies that a quarter of Iraqi children may be suffering from chronic malnutrition. Sheikh Mohamed, who is also the Defense Minister of the United Arab Emirates, announced at the inauguration ceremony that "we want to make Dubai a new trading center." Sheikh Mohammed, who is also the UAE Defence Minister, said during the launching ceremony "we wish to make Dubai a center of modern economy".

Effort He's trying to get hamas to co-exist with israel.

Obligative If necessary, I can come pick it up. For payment, we have to forecast the money two days out. After the Panama fiasco, they will need some reassurance. Certainly, the Colombian press is much in need of that. The location should be away from airports and main highways.

Potential So, if I know today, I can pay on Friday. Again, I do not have all of the information for July and August, so I cannot give you any numbers. If a mountainous location is unviable, then choose a location next to official Buildings so as to avoid being bombarded. Again, if the above is not possible, then choose a location next to residential areas, for the same reason as above.

Permissive Flights are not permitted into Iraq.

Evaluative Ditches: They are better than road bumps because they are harder to see.

The Interaction of Modality with Other Complex Aspects of Semantics The only person you can discuss work with is your direct commander (Amir)… Here, “the only person you can X with is Y”, means that you can X with Y but you cannot X with any person who is not Y (there are two modalities). This logical form is absolutely essential for automatic reasoning about the meaning of the sentence.