tricky counterfactual and causal inferences

[nschneid]

"... Nine unelected judges [ended up] making the decision that they [= activists] argued should be made by state legislatures," according to Ginsburg.

This is about abortion. The activists mentioned here believed that state legislatures should have the power to decide its legality, but the Supreme Court made a national ruling.

How do we annotate, effectively, 'W believed it should be up to X to decide issue Y, but Z took away that possibility and decided Y for itself'?

Here was my best shot:

(s / say-01
      :ARG0 (p3 / person :wiki "Ruth_Bader_Ginsburg" :name (n / name :op1 "Ginsburg"))
      :ARG1 (d / decide-01
            :ARG0 (p / person :quant 9
                  :ARG0-of (j / judge-01)
                  :ARG1-of (e / elect-01 :polarity -))
            :ARG1-of (i / instead-of-91
                  :ARG2 (d2 / decide-01
                        :ARG0 (g / government-organization
                              :ARG0-of (l / legislate-01)
                              :mod (s2 / state))
                        :topic t2
                        :ARG1-of (p4 / prefer-01
                              :ARG0 (t / they)
                              :ARG2 d)))
            :topic (t2 / thing)))

Interesting/controversial aspects here:

• using :topic thing for the issue, which is not locally specified, and making the topics of the two decide-01 events coreferent

• Should there be a way to mark the Court's decision as realis and the activists' wish for state legislature decisions as irrealis? That the Court's decision prevented the legislative decisions? Best I could come up with was:

  • d / decide-01 :ARG0 [9 judges]
  • d2 / decide-01 :ARG0 [state legislatures]
  • instead-of-91 :ARG1 d :ARG2 d2
  • prefer-01 :ARG0 [they (activists)] :ARG1 d2 :ARG2 d

  But this could also mean that state legislatures had also decided, and the activists like their decisions better. Perhaps a better interpretation:

  • d / decide-01 :ARG0 [9 judges]
  • d2 / decide-01 :ARG0 [state legislatures]
  • p / permit-01 :ARG0 [9 judges] :ARG1 d2
  • i / instead-of-91 :ARG1 d :ARG2 d2
  • wish-01 :ARG0 [they (activists)] :ARG1 i

[uhermjakob]

I like the dual :topic thing, which will also be useful for when we finally move to multi-sentence annotations.

The standard way to annotate should is recommend-01, which seems to fit well here. (See should under http://www.isi.edu/~ulf/amr/lib/amr-dict.html#modal%20verbs) We do not generally mark up irrealis. In this case it would be already be implied by recommend.