Do You Believe It Happened? Assessing Chinese Readers’ Veridicality Judgments

Yu-Yun Chang, Shu-Kai Hsieh


Abstract
This work collects and studies Chinese readers’ veridicality judgments to news events (whether an event is viewed as happening or not). For instance, in “The FBI alleged in court documents that Zazi had admitted having a handwritten recipe for explosives on his computer”, do people believe that Zazi had a handwritten recipe for explosives? The goal is to observe the pragmatic behaviors of linguistic features under context which affects readers in making veridicality judgments. Exploring from the datasets, it is found that features such as event-selecting predicates (ESP), modality markers, adverbs, temporal information, and statistics have an impact on readers’ veridicality judgments. We further investigated that modality markers with high certainty do not necessarily trigger readers to have high confidence in believing an event happened. Additionally, the source of information introduced by an ESP presents low effects to veridicality judgments, even when an event is attributed to an authority (e.g. “The FBI”). A corpus annotated with Chinese readers’ veridicality judgments is released as the Chinese PragBank for further analysis.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.33
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
259–267
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.33
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yu-Yun Chang and Shu-Kai Hsieh. 2020. Do You Believe It Happened? Assessing Chinese Readers’ Veridicality Judgments. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 259–267, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Do You Believe It Happened? Assessing Chinese Readers’ Veridicality Judgments (Chang & Hsieh, LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.33.pdf