Paul Portner


2023

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Pragmatic Annotation of Articles Related to Police Brutality
Tess Feyen | Alda Mari | Paul Portner
Proceedings of the 17th Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW-XVII)

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.

2021

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The Possible, the Plausible, and the Desirable: Event-Based Modality Detection for Language Processing
Valentina Pyatkin | Shoval Sadde | Aynat Rubinstein | Paul Portner | Reut Tsarfaty
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Modality is the linguistic ability to describe vents with added information such as how desirable, plausible, or feasible they are. Modality is important for many NLP downstream tasks such as the detection of hedging, uncertainty, speculation, and more. Previous studies that address modality detection in NLP often restrict modal expressions to a closed syntactic class, and the modal sense labels are vastly different across different studies, lacking an accepted standard. Furthermore, these senses are often analyzed independently of the events that they modify. This work builds on the theoretical foundations of the Georgetown Gradable Modal Expressions (GME) work by Rubinstein et al. (2013) to propose an event-based modality detection task where modal expressions can be words of any syntactic class and sense labels are drawn from a comprehensive taxonomy which harmonizes the modal concepts contributed by the different studies. We present experiments on the GME corpus aiming to detect and classify fine-grained modal concepts and associate them with their modified events. We show that detecting and classifying modal expressions is not only feasible, it also improves the detection of modal events in their own right.

2013

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Proceedings of the IWCS 2013 Workshop on Annotation of Modal Meanings in Natural Language (WAMM)
Paul Portner | Aynat Rubinstein | Graham Katz
Proceedings of the IWCS 2013 Workshop on Annotation of Modal Meanings in Natural Language (WAMM)

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Toward Fine-grained Annotation of Modality in Text
Aynat Rubinstein | Hillary Harner | Elizabeth Krawczyk | Daniel Simonson | Graham Katz | Paul Portner
Proceedings of the IWCS 2013 Workshop on Annotation of Modal Meanings in Natural Language (WAMM)