Veridicity annotation in the lexicon? A look at factive adjectives

What it is about

A short note on veridicity: whether a sentence commits the author to the truth of an embedded event. Factive adjectives such as "lucky" or "brave" are listed as factive in the lexicon, but the authors show that their factivity depends on more than the adjective and its frame. Roughly 800 adjectives take the extraposed frame "it is ADJ that S". Crowd-sourced tests, with about 100 native speakers per item, found that for "not stupid to" and "not lucky to" constructions around 20% of native speakers accept a non-factive reading, and that the split differs between adjectives. Tense and subject matter; a generic reading (for example "in the Middle Ages it was daring to ...") removes the presupposition; first-person conditionals ("If I realize later ...") and third-person generics behave differently. The paper gives no model, only a call for crowd-sourced lexical signatures that record the conditions in which a feature holds.

Ideas

• I1. en/src/dict.rs and the adjective entries: replace a single "factive" flag by a conditional entry: (adjective, frame, subject person, tense, generic or episodic) mapped to a signature, with a default when no condition is recorded. Store as BTreeMap entries so the lookup is ordered.
• I2. Treat the 20% accept-rate as a threshold: when a rule's evidence (from the lexicon or a corpus count) is split near 20/80, return "uncertain" instead of a hard factive label, and log the reason.
• I3. Build a small contrast set per adjective (past tense with explicit subject, present tense, generic subject, first person conditional) and measure how many of the rule's answers change.

For Mova

The chapter is 15. Adjectives and adverbs (evaluative adjectives) and 23. Complementation (the frames). The code is en/src/dict.rs for the lexicon, prag/src/infer.rs for the inference step and en/src/udreg.rs for the features that record tense and person. Measure: the number of answers that change when the frame conditions are added, on a list of the adjectives named in the paper; run twice. The paper's examples are illustrative, so the item list has to be written for Mova.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{zaenen2013veridicity,
  title = {{Veridicity annotation in the lexicon? A look at factive adjectives}},
  author = {Zaenen, Annie and Karttunen, Lauri},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 9th Joint ISO - ACL SIGSEM Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation},
  year = {2013},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W13-0505/}
}

References

18 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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