Modality annotation for Portuguese: from manual annotation to automatic labeling

Linguistic Issues in Language Technology

Iris Hendrickx¹  Luciana Ávila²  Amália Mendes³  Teresa Gonçalves⁴  Joao Sequeira⁴  Paulo Quaresma⁴ 

[1] Radboud University;Universidade Federal de Viçosa;University of Lisbon;University of Évora

关键词: modality;    corpus annotation;    text mining;    Portuguese linguistics;   

DOI  :  

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: C S L I Publications

【 摘 要 】

We investigate modality in Portuguese and we combine a linguistic perspective with an application-oriented perspective on modality. We design an annotation scheme reflecting theoretical linguistic concepts and apply this schema to a small corpus sample to show how the scheme deals with real world language usage. We present two schemas for Portuguese, one for spoken Brazilian Portuguese and one for written European Portuguese. Furthermore, we use the annotated data not only to study the linguistic phenomena of modality, but also to train a practical text mining tool to detect modality in text automatically. The modality tagger uses a machine learning classifier trained on automatically extracted features from a syntactic parser. As we only have a small annotated sample available, the tagger was evaluated on 11 modal verbs that are frequent in our corpus and that denote more than one modal meaning. Finally, we discuss several valuable insights into the complexity of the semantic concept of modality that derive from the process of manual annotation of the corpus and from the analysis of the results of the automatic labeling ambiguity and the semantic and syntactic  properties typically associated to one modal meaning in context, and also the interaction of modality with negation and focus. The knowledge gained from the manual annotation task leads us to propose a new unified scheme for modality that applies to the two Portuguese varieties and covers both written and spoken data. .

【 授权许可】

Unknown