Annotating Factive Verbs

Alvin Grissom II, Yusuke Miyao


Abstract
We have created a scheme for annotating corpora designed to capture relevant aspects of factivity in verb-complement constructions. Factivity constructions are a well-known linguistic phenomenon that embed presuppositions about the state of the world into a clause. These embedded presuppositions provide implicit information about facts assumed to be true in the world, and are thus potentially valuable in areas of research such as textual entailment. We attempt to address both clear-cut cases of factivity and non-factivity, as well as account for the fluidity and ambiguous nature of some realizations of this construction. Our extensible scheme is designed to account for distinctions between claims, performatives, atypical uses of factivity, and the authority of the one making the utterance. We introduce a simple XML-based syntax for the annotation of factive verbs and clauses, in order to capture this information. We also provide an analysis of the issues which led to these annotative decisions, in the hope that these analyses will be beneficial to those dealing with factivity in a practical context.
Anthology ID:
L12-1443
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)
Month:
May
Year:
2012
Address:
Istanbul, Turkey
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
4068–4072
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/757_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alvin Grissom II and Yusuke Miyao. 2012. Annotating Factive Verbs. In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 4068–4072, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Annotating Factive Verbs (Grissom II & Miyao, LREC 2012)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/pdf/757_Paper.pdf