Hello. I had some confusion about the modality annotation instructions, and I just want to write down my thoughts while I have them fresh on my mind. Please don't treat this as an urgent issue.
My first question is about epistemic versus deontic modality. I was surprised that UMR does not make a distinction between epistemic and deontic modality in the annotation. Based on 4-3-2 in the guidelines, It looks like Full means "certain", Partial means "probable", and Neutral means "possible" in the case of epistemic modals, but they mean something else when dealing with deontic modals. Have I understood this correctly? Why not use different terms for epistemic versus deontic modality? I think this distinction is really important for downstream applications which will want to know the likelihood of something happening in reality. Perhaps the labels could be Certain, Probable, Possible for epistemic modals (same as FactBank) and Required, Recommended, Suggested or something similar for deontic modals.
I have another question about negation. You represent negation in your annotations of modality as FullNeg, PrtNeg, and NeutNeg. Would it make sense to separate the negation as a :polarity - attribute? That would be more consistent with AMR notation elsewhere and I think it would make negation more human and computer-readable as well.
Hello. I had some confusion about the modality annotation instructions, and I just want to write down my thoughts while I have them fresh on my mind. Please don't treat this as an urgent issue.
My first question is about epistemic versus deontic modality. I was surprised that UMR does not make a distinction between epistemic and deontic modality in the annotation. Based on 4-3-2 in the guidelines, It looks like
Fullmeans "certain",Partialmeans "probable", andNeutralmeans "possible" in the case of epistemic modals, but they mean something else when dealing with deontic modals. Have I understood this correctly? Why not use different terms for epistemic versus deontic modality? I think this distinction is really important for downstream applications which will want to know the likelihood of something happening in reality. Perhaps the labels could beCertain,Probable,Possiblefor epistemic modals (same as FactBank) andRequired,Recommended,Suggestedor something similar for deontic modals.I have another question about negation. You represent negation in your annotations of modality as
FullNeg,PrtNeg, andNeutNeg. Would it make sense to separate the negation as a:polarity -attribute? That would be more consistent with AMR notation elsewhere and I think it would make negation more human and computer-readable as well.Thank you for your time and feedback.