Pragmatic Annotation of Articles Related to Police Brutality (2023)

Abstract: The annotation task we elaborated aims at describing the contextual factors that influence the appearance and interpretation of moral predicates, in newspaper articles on police brutality, in French and in English. The paper provides a brief review of the literature on moral predicates and their relation with context. The paper also describes the elaboration of the corpus and the ontology. Our hypothesis is that the use of moral adjectives and their appearance in context could change depending on the political orientation of the journal. We elaborated an annotation task to investigate the precise contexts discussed in articles on police brutality. The paper concludes by describing the study and the annotation task in details.

## introduction the use of moral predicates in natural language is a topic of interest for linguists, as it sheds light on the complex interplay between language, ethics, and society. the annotation task proposed in this paper studies the use of moral predicates in newspaper articles in french and in english discussing police brutality, with a focus on the contextual factors that influence their appearance and interpretation. indeed, our broader research goal is to determine whether the use of moral adjectives and their appearance in context changes depending on the political orientation of the journal. to achieve this goal, we elaborated a pragmatic annotation on a corpus of newspaper articles on the george floyd and adama traoré cases, published between may 2020 and august 2020, from a variety of newspapers across the political spectrum. a basic contextual ontology that has been elaborated specifically for this study, that takes into account various actors involved in events surrounding police brutality. we will start by making a brief review of the literature on moral predicates, their relation with context, and pragmatic annotation. then we'll describe the elaboration of the ontology, and some preliminary results that lead us to decisions for the annotation task. finally, we'll describe the study and annotation task in details. we currently don't have the results of this annotation, as the participants are still annotating at this time. ## background of the study and some assumptions moral predicates (like good, wrong) gained more popularity in the last years @xcite @xcite , and linguists often compared them to predicates of personal taste (like tasty, fun) (i.a. @xcite and to aesthetic predicates (like beautiful, elegant) (i.a. mcnally and @xcite . indeed, moral predicates show similar patterns to predicates of personal taste (ppts) in that they express a subjective judgment. faultless disagreement appears when two speakers disagree on a subjective matter. it is the type of disagreement that two people can have over liking pork belly or not for example ; no one is right or wrong, they just have different tastes. indeed, a statement made about taste cannot be countered by stating the speaker's experience is false. for that reason, and similarly to ppts, moral predicates are very sensitive to the context they are in ; they react to the experience the speaker is discussing foot_0 . to our knowledge, only one corpus study was done on moral predicates @xcite , precisely on the type of subjectivity moral predicates capture. @xcite argue in their article that the strength of faultless disagreements changes when taste predicates are used in the context of widely-held opinions. indeed, faultless disagreement isn't a binary phenomenon, but a gradient one, that depends on the object of predication (and not just on the predicate itself). we can then make the hypothesis that moral predicates are also sensitive to a change of context, and that this could have implications for the subjectivity they express. the lack in current knowledge on the use of moral predicates in context, and the assumption that context can influence their understanding all together were the first issues that brought us to investigate this topic. theses consideration in mind brought us to the field of pragmatics, specifically at the intersection of what @xcite calls "speaker meaning" and "contextual meaning". indeed, what the speaker is thinking before uttering a sentence, and how the context can influence this thought is especially vague when it comes to moral predicates. for ppts like tasty, we assume the speaker is talking about her own experience relating to some dish. however, expressing that pizza for example is tasty is less surprising than doing it for spinach or snails (see again @xcite . context then has to remain the same if we want to analyze the behavior of moral predicates. what differentiates the use of right from the use of good? are just and right more likely to be used in contexts where justice is mentioned, as one could infer intuitively? are moral adjectives used when the context is clear, or when it is shifting from one topic to another? our goal with this annotation task isn't as broad as analyzing the specific subjectivity expressed in moral predicates or giving a semantic analysis of the meaning of such predicates 2 . instead, understanding precisely what is being discussed in these articles will allow us to understand the contexts in which moral predicates are more likely to be used. this annotation task is to be considered as the first step towards this analysis. it will help us provide a better understanding of the context itself, in order to make hypothesis on the behavior of moral predicates in articles on police brutality. ## annotation task this is a description of the annotation task our participants are currently accomplishing. each sentence will be annotated twice : once by a member of the research team, and once by a recruited participant. we currently cannot present a measure of the inter-annotator agreement, as the task is still in progress. however, we are aware of the subjectivity of the task : even though the guidelines focus on the context surrounding each sentence and doesn't ask from the annotator to express a personal opinion on the topic itself, the perceived importance of the topic discussed can still vary from one person to the other. ## conclusion the aim of this paper was to describe the elaboration of a pragmatic annotation task, that takes into account the specifics of the police brutality context. our hypotheses is that moral predicates could potentially be a marker of biases in newspapers articles. currently, we know very little about the behavior of moral predicates in context, since only one corpus study involving them has been conducted. to allow for an understanding of the variety of topics surrounding police brutality, we elaborated a ontology based on the adama traoré and the george floyd cases. our goal is to investigate how moral predicates behave in discussion of these similar contexts, to compare them with one another and crosslinguistically, as well as to see if one (or more) sub-context of police brutality is more likely to involve moral predicates. by proposing an annotation task to precise the context of police brutality itself, and by choosing articles containing moral predicates and articles that don't, we are hoping to answer these questions. we are aware that this work is still at its early stage, but are looking forward to get feedback on this primary study, in hopes of perfecting it in the future.