Recognizing subjective sentences: a computational investigation of narrative text
Recognizing subjective sentences: a computational investigation of narrative text
Journal of the American Society for Information Science
Exploring models of information behaviour: the ‘uncertainty’ project
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal - Special issue on Information Seeking In Context (ISIC)
Toward a reconceptualization of information seeking research: focus on the exchange of meaning
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal - Special issue on Information Seeking In Context (ISIC)
Information seeking and mediated searching. Part 2: uncertainty and its correlates
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval
Introduction to Modern Information Retrieval
The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics (Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics S.)
The Oxford Handbook of Computational Linguistics (Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics S.)
On deception and deception detection: content analysis of computer-mediated stated beliefs
Proceedings of the 73rd ASIS&T Annual Meeting on Navigating Streams in an Information Ecosystem - Volume 47
Are you sure that this happened? assessing the factuality degree of events in text
Computational Linguistics
Cross-genre and cross-domain detection of semantic uncertainty
Computational Linguistics
How do negation and modality impact on opinions?
ExProM '12 Proceedings of the Workshop on Extra-Propositional Aspects of Meaning in Computational Linguistics
A tentative study on the annotation of evidentiality
CLSW'12 Proceedings of the 13th Chinese conference on Chinese Lexical Semantics
| Hi-index | 0.00 |
This article introduces a type of uncertainty that resides in textual information and requires epistemic interpretation on the information seeker's part. Epistemic modality, as defined in linguistics and natural language processing, is a writer's estimation of the validity of propositional content in texts. It is an evaluation of chances that a certain hypothetical state of affairs is true, e.g., definitely true or possibly true. This research shifts attention from the uncertainty-certainty dichotomy to a gradient epistemic continuum of absolute, high, moderate, low certainty, and uncertainty. An analysis of a New York Times dataset showed that epistemically modalized statements are pervasive in news discourse and they occur at a significantly higher rate in editorials than in news reports. Four independent annotators were able to recognize a gradation on the continuum but individual perceptions of the boundaries between levels were highly subjective. Stricter annotation instructions and longer coder training improved intercoder agreement results. This paper offers an interdisciplinary bridge between research in linguistics, natural language processing, and information seeking with potential benefits to design and implementation of information systems for situations where large amounts of textual information are screened manually on a regular basis, for instance, by professional intelligence or business analysts.