We present an annotation model of modality which is (i) cross-linguistic, relying on a wide, strongly typologically motivated approach, and (ii) hierarchical and layered, accounting for both factuality and speaker's attitude, while modelling these two aspects through separate annotation schemes. Modality is defined through cross-linguistic categories, but the classification of actual linguistic expressions is language-specific. This makes our annotation model a powerful tool for investigating linguistic diversity in the field of modality on the basis of real language data, being thus also useful from the perspective of machine translation systems.
REF introduce an annotation scheme for the cross-linguistic annotation of modality in corpora.
Cross-linguistic annotation of modality: a data-driven hierarchical model
ACL 2013
Computer Science