A modality lexicon and its use in automatic tagging

TitleA modality lexicon and its use in automatic tagging
Publication TypeJournal Articles
Year of Publication2010
AuthorsBaker K, Bloodgood M, Dorr BJ, Filardo NW, Levin L, Piatko C
JournalProceedings of the Seventh conference on International Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’10)
Pagination1402 - 1407
Date Published2010///
Abstract

This paper describes our resource-building results for an eight-week JHU Human Language Technology Center of Excellence SummerCamp for Applied Language Exploration (SCALE-2009) on Semantically-Informed Machine Translation. Specifically, we describe the
construction of a modality annotation scheme, a modality lexicon, and two automated modality taggers that were built using the lexicon
and annotation scheme. Our annotation scheme is based on identifying three components of modality: a trigger, a target and a holder.
We describe how our modality lexicon was produced semi-automatically, expanding from an initial hand-selected list of modality trigger
words and phrases. The resulting expanded modality lexicon is being made publicly available. We demonstrate that one tagger—a
structure-based tagger—results in precision around 86% (depending on genre) for tagging of a standard LDC data set. In a machine
translation application, using the structure-based tagger to annotate English modalities on an English-Urdu training corpus improved the
translation quality score for Urdu by 0.3 Bleu points in the face of sparse training data.