ModaFact: Multi-paradigm Evaluation for Joint Event Modality and Factuality Detection

Marco Rovera, Serena Cristoforetti, Sara Tonelli


Abstract
Factuality and modality are two crucial aspects concerning events, since they convey the speaker’s commitment to a situation in discourse as well as how this event is supposed to occur in terms of norms, wishes, necessity, duty and so on. Capturing them both is necessary to truly understand an utterance meaning and the speaker’s perspective with respect to a mentioned event. Yet, NLP studies have mostly dealt with these two aspects separately, mainly devoting past efforts to the development of English datasets. In this work, we propose ModaFact, a novel resource with joint factuality and modality information for event-denoting expressions in Italian. We propose a novel annotation scheme, which however is consistent with existing ones, and compare different classification systems trained on ModaFact, as a preliminary step to the use of factuality and modality information in downstream tasks. The dataset and the best-performing model are publicly released and available under an open license.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.425
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6378–6396
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.425/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marco Rovera, Serena Cristoforetti, and Sara Tonelli. 2025. ModaFact: Multi-paradigm Evaluation for Joint Event Modality and Factuality Detection. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6378–6396, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ModaFact: Multi-paradigm Evaluation for Joint Event Modality and Factuality Detection (Rovera et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.425.pdf