MOMA 2015

MOdels for Modality Annotation

Workshop co-located with IWCS 2015 - London, 14 April 2015

The workshop programme is available!

The Proceedings are available! They will also be included in the ACL Anthology

The notion of modality involves a spectrum of phenomena that are pervasive in language but far from being formalised. For an exhaustive formalisation, a joint effort by computational, corpus, and formal linguists as well as language typologists is required.

Computationally, the automatic identification and interpretation of modalised statements is a prime concern in a large number of applications, especially with the recent attention to opinion mining and social networks. Indeed, recent years have witnessed the development of annotation schemes and annotated corpora for different aspects of modality in different languages. While there have been efforts towards finding a common avenue for modality annotation, (the CoNLL-2010 Shared Task, ACL thematic workshops and a special issue of Computational Linguistics), the computational linguistics community is still far from having developed working, shared standards for converting modality-related issues into annotation categories.

In corpus linguistics studies of modality-related phenomena, researchers use an incremental method based on redefining categories after assessing agreement through several rounds of manual annotation, with the aim of finding the right balance between feasibility and expressivity of categories.

Formally, and from a comparative linguistics perspective, characterisations are sought of the range of modal types and their marking across the languages of the world, towards a complete classification of modal functions. This would yield a thorough understanding of the relations holding between modal categories, and an understanding of the grammatical vs. lexical nature of modal markers across languages. Insights from this tradition are crucial for the advancement of computational work on modality, since a comprehensive scheme for producing reliable annotated data must obviously be usable from a computational perspective, but it also has to rely on a solid theoretical base. In other words, a balance must be found between accuracy and detailing in the description of the phenomenon, and preventing proliferation of labels which might cause data to be too sparse to learn from, and also lower agreement among annotators.

The main aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from all involved fields to join efforts in defining exhaustive and at the same time usable representations of modality, towards working, implementable annotation standards. Beside the contribution of peer-reviewed research papers, we envisage a truly hands-on event as part of this workshop, where we would like to encourage participants to possibly try each other's annotation tools and schemes, and set up a roadmap for reaching shared standards in the annotation of modality.

Papers are solicited on topics such as (list not exhaustive):

• annotation schemes for modality
• resources annotated for modality
• automatic approaches to modality detection/interpretation
• cross-linguistic formalisations of modality
• concrete strategies for the annotation of modality
• issues with modality annotation of speech
• issues with polarity and negation
• modality and opinion mining
• annotation tools for marking modality
• linguistic issues
• profile-based approaches to modality

Keynote speaker: James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University, title TBA

Paper Submission

Standard research papers should be a mamximum of 8 pages long, including references. We also encourage submission of short papers of maximum 4 pages (references included), for describing technical issues concerning annotation, or a very specific modality phenomenon, for example. All papers should be electronically submitted in PDF format via EasyChair. Submissions must be anonymous and follow the IWCS formatting guidelines The deadline for submission is 21st December 2014. The accepted papers will be part of the conference proceedings and will be published electronically in the ACL Anthology.

***NEW***: a selection of (extended) accepted papers will also be published in a special issue on modality of LiLT (Linguistic Issues in Language Technology)

Programme Committee

• Johan van der Auwera, University of Antwerp
• Delphine Battistelli, Paris 10 Nanterre
• Anette Frank, Heidelberg University
• Dylan Glynn, University of Paris 8
• Ferdinand de Haan, Oracle Language Technology Group
• Iris Hendrickx, University of Nijmegen
• Caterina Mauri, University of Pavia
• Marjorie McShane, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• Roser Morante, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
• James Pustejovsky, Brandeis University
• Andrea Sansò, University of Insubria
• Roser Saurí, University Pompeu Fabra
• Caroline Sporleder, Trier University
• Veronika Vincze, University of Szeged

Organisers

• Malvina Nissim, University of Groningen
• Paola Pietrandrea, University of Tours and CNRS LLL