Abstract
The study of modal verbs in the growing vaccination debate reveals important insights into perspectives on vaccination: must children be vaccinated or are parents allowed not to vaccinate? How strong are the recommendations by pro- and anti-vaccination supporters? We present experimental work on annotation of modal verbs and their senses in texts related to the vaccination debate, as well as the resulting corpus. The results from our pilot study suggest that the most frequent type of modality was epistemic - indicating that participants in the debate appear to be more concerned with the safety and efficacy of vaccines than with moral arguments. Those against vaccination appear to be more committed or convinced of their views than those in favor, as evidenced by the use of the modal must.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | LREC 2020 |
| Subtitle of host publication | Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation |
| Editors | Nicoletta Calzolari, Frederic Bechet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis |
| Place of Publication | Marseille, France |
| Publisher | European Language Resources Association (ELRA) |
| Pages | 5730-5738 |
| Number of pages | 9 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9791095546344 |
| Publication status | Published - May 2020 |
| Event | 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2020 - Marseille, France Duration: 11 May 2020 → 16 May 2020 |
Conference
| Conference | 12th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2020 |
|---|---|
| Country/Territory | France |
| City | Marseille |
| Period | 11/05/20 → 16/05/20 |
Keywords
- Annotation
- Modality
- Vaccination debate
