Designing and Validating an Annotation Model of Dynamic Modality for English and Spanish: Issues and Problems

Abstract

In this paper we set forth an annotation model for dynamic modality in English and Spanish, given its relevance not only for contrastive linguistic purposes, but also for its impact on practical annotation tasks in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) community. An annotation scheme is proposed, which captures both the functionalsemantic meanings and the language-specific realisations of dynamic meanings in both languages. The scheme is validated through a reliability study performed on a randomly selected set of one hundred and twenty sentences from the MULTINOT corpus, resulting in a high degree of inter-annotator agreement. We discuss our main findings and give attention to the difficult cases as they are currently being used to develop detailed guidelines for the large-scale annotation of dynamic modality in English and Spanish.