An Annotation Scheme for Factuality and its Application to Parliamentary Proceedings
This work addresses the need for structured factuality assessment in parliamentary discourse, but it is incremental as it builds on existing concepts and focuses on a specific domain and language.
The authors tackled the problem of factuality annotation in language by developing a multi-faceted scheme for Hebrew and applying it to 5,000 sentences from parliamentary discourse, reporting inter-annotator agreement and experimenting with automated prediction methods.
Factuality assesses the extent to which a language utterance relates to real-world information; it determines whether utterances correspond to facts, possibilities, or imaginary situations, and as such, it is instrumental for fact checking. Factuality is a complex notion that relies on multiple linguistic signals, and has been studied in various disciplines. We present a complex, multi-faceted annotation scheme of factuality that combines concepts from a variety of previous works. We developed the scheme for Hebrew, but we trust that it can be adapted to other languages. We also present a set of almost 5,000 sentences in the domain of parliamentary discourse that we manually annotated according to this scheme. We report on inter-annotator agreement, and experiment with various approaches to automatically predict (some features of) the scheme, in order to extend the annotation to a large corpus.