Annotating and Recognizing Event Modality in Text

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Current results in basic Information Extraction tasks such as Named Entity Recognition or Event Extraction suggest that we are close to achieving a stage where the fundamental units for text understanding are put together; namely, predicates and their arguments. However, other layers of information, such as event modality, are essential for understanding, since the inferences derivable from factual events are obviously different from those judged as possible or non-existent. In this paper, we first map out the scope of modality in natural language; we propose a specification language for annotating this information in text; and finally we describe two tools that automatically recognizing modal information in natural language text.