---
title: "Interactive Annotation for Event Modality in Modern Standard and"
description: "Arabic lacked a large corpus labelled for event modality, meaning potential rather than actual events: obligation, permission… 24 references."
authors: ["Rania Al-Sabbagh", "Roxana Girju", "Jana Diesner"]
year: 2014
venue: "Proceedings of LAW VIII - The 8th Linguistic Annotation Workshop"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W14-4920/"
doi: "10.3115/v1/w14-4920"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sabbagh-2014-interactive-annotation-event-modality-modern/"
---
[Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sabbagh-2014-interactive-annotation-event-modality-modern/)

[home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2014](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2014/page/4/) / Interactive Annotation for Event Modality in Modern Standard and Egyptian Arabic Tweets

# Interactive Annotation for Event Modality in Modern Standard and Egyptian Arabic Tweets

**Authors:** [Rania Al-Sabbagh](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/rania-al-sabbagh/), [Roxana Girju](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/roxana-girju/) and [Jana Diesner](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/jana-diesner/) · **Year:** 2014 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of LAW VIII - The 8th Linguistic Annotation Workshop](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/law-viii-the-linguistic-annotation-workshop/) ([LAW VIII - The Linguistic Annotation Workshop 2014](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/law-viii-the-linguistic-annotation-workshop/2014/)) · **Publisher:** [Association for Computational Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/association-for-computational-linguistics/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W14-4920/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W14-4920.pdf) · [DOI 10.3115/v1/w14-4920](https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/w14-4920) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2251716009)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
Arabic lacked a large corpus labelled for event modality, meaning potential rather than actual events: obligation, permission, commitment, ability and volition, following Palmer's (2001) taxonomy. Existing modality schemes elsewhere usually depend on theory-heavy guidelines and trained linguists, which keeps them small. The authors collected Egyptian Twitter data that mixes Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Egyptian Arabic (EA). They pre-marked candidate triggers by string matching against earlier modality lexicons. Annotators then labelled six attributes through an interactive question flow, where later questions appear or stay hidden depending on earlier answers: sense, polarity, intensification, tense, holders and scopes. Nested holders and merged triggers are derived automatically from those answers. Because no linguistic training is needed, the procedure suits crowdsourcing. Agreement, measured with Krippendorff's alpha, was high and in line with comparable work. The result is a modality resource larger than earlier ones in several languages. It is intended for later machine-learning work on Arabic modality and for finding key political actors on Twitter.

## Key points
- The corpus has 9949 unique tweets with 12,134 highlighted candidate triggers, covering 315 unique trigger types.
- In the majority labels, 7884 candidates are modal and 4250 are non-modal.
  - Polarity: 4733 AFF, 3151 NEG.
  - Intensification: 1565 AMP, 1647 MTG, 4672 AS IS.
  - Tense: 4923 PRS, 2961 PST.
- About 60.5% of triggers have zero-nested holders, meaning the tweet's author is the only holder. Example 6 in the paper has three nested holders.
- Tense agreement was nearly perfect.
  - Holder disagreements came mostly from generic nouns and impersonal pronouns such as "the people" or "one".
  - Scope disagreements came from ambiguous subordinating conjunctions, trigger modifiers and missing punctuation.
- Limitations: no future tense, only declarative mood, and no modality entailment (for example, when a user criticises someone else's stated obligation).

## Interesting ideas
- Sense is decided by asking whether a candidate is synonymous with one of several exemplar sets, instead of applying an abstract definition; the exemplars deliberately mix varieties, single words and multiword expressions, polarities and intensities, which makes them a compact operational stand-in for a category.
- Each label must come with a justification: annotators cannot pick "non-modal" without supplying their own synonym, and they must name the cause of any negation or intensity change; this blocks lazy shortcut answers and produces the reason alongside the label.
- Polarity is computed from several sources: particles, affixes, negative polarity items, negated auxiliaries, inherently negative lexemes, and embedding under a negated epistemic verb; stacked negations flip back to affirmative.
- Holders are represented as a nested chain (the user quotes Obama, who believes something about the Iranians), and the chain is built from a few yes/no questions about quotation and assumption.
- Intensity is treated as a lexical baseline that context can amplify or mitigate through modifiers, coordination, categorical negation, emphatics or epistemic embedding.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): LLM teacher tiers could be given small, varied exemplar sets per VerbNet class or modal sense and asked a synonymy question, which should give more consistent silver labels than definitions.
- **I2** (learn): requiring teachers or witness parsers to give a reason alongside every label would act as a built-in check and supply raw material for self-induced repair rules.
- **I3** (frames): prag could compute frame polarity explicitly from these sources, so "I don't think it's necessary" does not produce an asserted obligation and the derivation stays explainable.
- **I4** (world): the world of a text could keep each state or desire under a source stack, so answers can say who holds a claim and through whom it is reported.
- **I5** (world): modal strength could be stored as a lexical value in compiled knowledge, with context rules adjusting it, giving graded and traceable obligation or desire strengths.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-illinois-urbana-champaign/) — University, Urbana, United States · 209 works · 71,394 citations

📚 Shelves (4): [🖥️ Computer Science](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · 18,614 works · [🤖 Artificial Intelligence](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · 17,965 works · [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 17,450 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 17,296 works

🧭 Topics (1): [Semitic languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/semitic-languages/) · 3,066 works

## Cite

Cite as: Rania Al-Sabbagh, Roxana Girju and Jana Diesner. 2014. Interactive Annotation for Event Modality in Modern Standard and Egyptian Arabic Tweets. Proceedings of LAW VIII - The 8th Linguistic Annotation Workshop.

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{alsabbagh2014interactive,
  title = {{Interactive Annotation for Event Modality in Modern Standard and Egyptian Arabic Tweets}},
  author = {Rania Al-Sabbagh, Roxana Girju and Jana Diesner},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of LAW VIII - The 8th Linguistic Annotation Workshop},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.3115/v1/w14-4920},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/w14-4920}
}
```

- [← previous Induction of a variable granularity property grammar from the Arabic Treebank ATB (Induction d'une grammaire de propriétés à granularité variable à partir du treebank arabe ATB) in French](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bahloul-2014-induction-variable-granularity-property-grammar/)
- [next → INVITED TALK 1: Computational Processing of Arabic Dialects](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/habash-2014-invited-talk-1-computational-processing/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2014](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2014/page/4/)

## References

24 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Rania Al-Sabbagh, Jana Diesner and Roxana Girju. 2013. [Using the Semantic-Syntactic Interface for Reliable Arabic Modality Annotation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sabbagh-2013-semantic-syntactic-interface-reliable-arabic/). In Proceedings of IJCNLP'13, pages 410-418, October 14-18, 2013, Nagoya, Japan.
2. Rania Al-Sabbagh, Roxana Girju and Jana Diesner. 2014a. Unsupervised Construction of a Lexicon and a Pattern Repository of Arabic Modal Multiword Expressions. In Proceedings of the 10 th Workshop of Multiword Expressions at EACL'14, April 26-27, 2014, Gothenburg, Sweden. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Rania+Al%2DSabbagh%2C+Roxana+Girju+and+Jana+Diesner%2E+2014a%2E+Unsupervised+Construction+of+a+Lexicon+and+a+Pattern+Repository+of+Arabic+Modal+Multiword+Expressions%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+10+th+Workshop+of+M)
3. Rania Al-Sabbagh, Roxana Girju and Jana Diesner. 2014b. [3arif: A Corpus of Modern Standard and Egyptian Arabic Tweets Annotated for Epistemic Modality Using Interactive Crowdsourcing](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sabbagh-2014-3arif-corpus-modern-standard-egyptian/). In Proceedings of the 25 th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, August 23-29, 2014, Dublin, Ireland.
4. Ron Artstein and Massimo Poesio. 2008. Inter-Coder Agreement for Computational Linguistics. Computational Linguistics, volume 34, issue 4, pages 555-596. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ron+Artstein+and+Massimo+Poesio%2E+2008%2E+Inter%2DCoder+Agreement+for+Computational+Linguistics%2E+Computational+Linguistics%2C+volume+34%2C+issue+4%2C+pages+555%2D596%2E)
5. Kathrin Baker, Michael Bloodgood, Mona Diab, Bonnie Dorr, Nathaniel W. Filardo, Lori Levin and Christine Piatko. 2010. A Modality Lexicon and its Use in Automatic Tagging. In Proceedings of the 7 th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), pages 1402-1405, May 19-21, 2010, Valetta, Malta. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Kathrin+Baker%2C+Michael+Bloodgood%2C+Mona+Diab%2C+Bonnie+Dorr%2C+Nathaniel+W%2E+Filardo%2C+Lori+Levin+and+Christine+Piatko%2E+2010%2E+A+Modality+Lexicon+and+its+Use+in+Automatic+Tagging%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+7+th+I)
6. Kathryn Baker, Michael Bloodgood, Bonnie J. Dorr, Chris Callison-Burch, Nathaniel W. Filardo, Christine Piatko, Lori Levin and Scott Miller. 2012. Modality and Negation in SIMT. Computational Linguistics. volume 38, issue 2, pages 411-438. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Kathryn+Baker%2C+Michael+Bloodgood%2C+Bonnie+J%2E+Dorr%2C+Chris+Callison%2DBurch%2C+Nathaniel+W%2E+Filardo%2C+Christine+Piatko%2C+Lori+Levin+and+Scott+Miller%2E+2012%2E+Modality+and+Negation+in+SIMT%2E+Computational+Linguist)
7. Samuel R. Bowman and Harshit Chopra. 2012. Automatic Animacy Classification. In Proceedings of the NAACL HTL 2012 Student Research Workshop, pages 7-10, June 3-8, 2012, Montreal, Canada. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Samuel+R%2E+Bowman+and+Harshit+Chopra%2E+2012%2E+Automatic+Animacy+Classification%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+NAACL+HTL+2012+Student+Research+Workshop%2C+pages+7%2D10%2C+June+3%2D8%2C+2012%2C+Montreal%2C+Canada%2E)
8. Kristen E. Brustad. 2000. The Syntax of Spoken Arabic: A Comparative Study of Moroccan, Egyptian, Syrian and Kuwaiti Dialects. Georgetown University Press, Washington DC, USA. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Kristen+E%2E+Brustad%2E+2000%2E+The+Syntax+of+Spoken+Arabic%3A+A+Comparative+Study+of+Moroccan%2C+Egyptian%2C+Syrian+and+Kuwaiti+Dialects%2E+Georgetown+University+Press%2C+Washington+DC%2C+USA%2E)
9. Cohan Sujay Carlos and Madulika Yalamanchi. 2012. Intention Analysis for Sales, Marketing and Customer Service. In Processing of COLING 2012: Demonstration Papers, pages 33-40, December 2012, Mumbai, India. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Cohan+Sujay+Carlos+and+Madulika+Yalamanchi%2E+2012%2E+Intention+Analysis+for+Sales%2C+Marketing+and+Customer+Service%2E+In+Processing+of+COLING+2012%3A+Demonstration+Papers%2C+pages+33%2D40%2C+December+2012%2C+Mumbai%2C+)
10. Baptiste Chardon, Farah Benamara, Yannick Mathieu, Vladimir Popescu and Nicholas Asher. 2013. Sentiment Composition Using a Parabolic Model. In Proceedings of the 10 th International Conference on Computational Semantics (IWCS 2013), pages 47-58, March 20-22, 2013, Potsdam, Germany. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Baptiste+Chardon%2C+Farah+Benamara%2C+Yannick+Mathieu%2C+Vladimir+Popescu+and+Nicholas+Asher%2E+2013%2E+Sentiment+Composition+Using+a+Parabolic+Model%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+10+th+International+Conference+on+Com)
11. Yanyan Cui and Ting Chi. 2013. Annotating Modal Expressions in the Chinese Treebank. In Proceedings of the IWC 2013Workshop on Annotation of Modal Meaning in Natural Language (WAMM), pages 24-32, March 2013, Potsdam, Germany. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Yanyan+Cui+and+Ting+Chi%2E+2013%2E+Annotating+Modal+Expressions+in+the+Chinese+Treebank%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+IWC+2013Workshop+on+Annotation+of+Modal+Meaning+in+Natural+Language+%28WAMM%29%2C+pages+24%2D32%2C+Marc)
12. Iris Hendrickx, Amàlia Mendes and Silvia Mencarelti. 2012. Modality in Text: A Proposal for Corpus Annotation. In Proceedings of the 8 th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12), pages 1805-1812, May 21-27, 2012, Istanbul, Turkey. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Iris+Hendrickx%2C+Am%C3%A0lia+Mendes+and+Silvia+Mencarelti%2E+2012%2E+Modality+in+Text%3A+A+Proposal+for+Corpus+Annotation%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+8+th+International+Conference+on+Language+Resources+and+Evaluation+)
13. Klaus Krippendorff. 2011. Computing Krippendorff's Alpha-Reliability. Annenberg School of Communication, Departmental Papers: University of Pennsylvania. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Klaus+Krippendorff%2E+2011%2E+Computing+Krippendorff%27s+Alpha%2DReliability%2E+Annenberg+School+of+Communication%2C+Departmental+Papers%3A+University+of+Pennsylvania%2E)
14. Andrew Lampert, Robert Dale and Cecile Paris. 2010. Detecting Emails Containing Requests for Action. In Proceedings of Human Language Technologies: the 2010 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the ACL, pages 984-992, June 2010, Los Angles, California. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Andrew+Lampert%2C+Robert+Dale+and+Cecile+Paris%2E+2010%2E+Detecting+Emails+Containing+Requests+for+Action%2E+In+Proceedings+of+Human+Language+Technologies%3A+the+2010+Annual+Conference+of+the+North+American+Cha)
15. Ying-Shu Liao and Ting-Gen Liao. 2009. Modal Verbs for the Advice Move in Advice Columns. In Proceedings of the 23 rd Pacific Asia Conference on language, Information and Computation, pages 307-316, December 3-5, 2009, Hong Kong, China. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ying%2DShu+Liao+and+Ting%2DGen+Liao%2E+2009%2E+Modal+Verbs+for+the+Advice+Move+in+Advice+Columns%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+23+rd+Pacific+Asia+Conference+on+language%2C+Information+and+Computation%2C+pages+307%2D316%2C+D)
16. Suguru Matsuyoshi, Megumi Eguchi, Chitose Sao, Koji Murakami, Kentaro Inui and Yuji Matsumoto. 2010. Annotating Event Mentions in Text with Modality, Focus and Source Information. In Proceedings of LREC'10, pages 1456-1463, May 19-21, 2010, Valletta, Malta. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Suguru+Matsuyoshi%2C+Megumi+Eguchi%2C+Chitose+Sao%2C+Koji+Murakami%2C+Kentaro+Inui+and+Yuji+Matsumoto%2E+2010%2E+Annotating+Event+Mentions+in+Text+with+Modality%2C+Focus+and+Source+Information%2E+In+Proceedings+of+LR)
17. T. F. Mitchell and S. A. Al-Hassan. 1994. Modality, Mood and Aspect in Spoken Arabic with Special Reference to Egypt and the Levant. London and NY: Kegan Paul International. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=T%2E+F%2E+Mitchell+and+S%2E+A%2E+Al%2DHassan%2E+1994%2E+Modality%2C+Mood+and+Aspect+in+Spoken+Arabic+with+Special+Reference+to+Egypt+and+the+Levant%2E+London+and+NY%3A+Kegan+Paul+International%2E)
18. Ola Moshref. 2012. Corpus Study of Tense, Aspect, and Modality in Diglossic Speech in Cairene Arabic. PhD Thesis. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ola+Moshref%2E+2012%2E+Corpus+Study+of+Tense%2C+Aspect%2C+and+Modality+in+Diglossic+Speech+in+Cairene+Arabic%2E+PhD+Thesis%2E+University+of+Illinois+at+Urbana%2DChampaign%2E)
19. Frank R. Palmer. 2001. Mood and Modality. 2 nd Edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Frank+R%2E+Palmer%2E+2001%2E+Mood+and+Modality%2E+2+nd+Edition%2E+Cambridge+University+Press%2C+Cambridge%2C+UK%2E)
20. J. Ramanand, Krishna Bhavsar and Niranjan Pedanekar. 2010. Wishful Thinking: Finding Suggestions and "Buy" Wishes for Product Reviews. In Proceedings of the NAACL HLT 2010 Workshop on Computational Approaches to the Analysis and Generation of Emotion in Text, pages 54-61, June 2010, Los Angeles, California. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=J%2E+Ramanand%2C+Krishna+Bhavsar+and+Niranjan+Pedanekar%2E+2010%2E+Wishful+Thinking%3A+Finding+Suggestions+and+%22Buy%22+Wishes+for+Product+Reviews%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+NAACL+HLT+2010+Workshop+on+Computational+Ap)
21. Aynat Rubinstein, Hillary Harner, Elizabeth Krawczyk, Daniel Simoson, Graham Katz and Paul Portner. 2013. Toward Fine-Grained Annotation of Modality in Text. In Proceedings of the IWC 2013Workshop on Annotation of Modal Meaning in Natural Language (WAMM), pages 38-46, March 2013, Potsdam, Germany. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Aynat+Rubinstein%2C+Hillary+Harner%2C+Elizabeth+Krawczyk%2C+Daniel+Simoson%2C+Graham+Katz+and+Paul+Portner%2E+2013%2E+Toward+Fine%2DGrained+Annotation+of+Modality+in+Text%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+IWC+2013Workshop+on+)
22. Roser Saurí and James Pustejovsky. 2009. FactBank: A Corpus Annotated with Event Factuality. Language Resources and Evaluation, 43:227-268 [↗](https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-009-9089-9)
23. György Szarvas, Veronika Vincze, Richárd Farkas and János Csirik. 2008. [The BioScope Corpus: Annotation for Negation, Uncertainty and their Scope in Biomedical Texts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/szarvas-2008-bioscope-corpus-annotation-negation-uncertainty/). In Proceedings of BioNLP 2008: Current Trends in Biomedical Natural Language Processing, pages 38-45, June 2008, Columbus, Ohio, USA.
24. Janyce Wiebe, Theresa Wilson and Claire Cardie. 2005. Annotating Expressions of Opinions and Emotions in Language. Language Resources and Evaluation, volume 39, issue 203, pages 1663-210. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Janyce+Wiebe%2C+Theresa+Wilson+and+Claire+Cardie%2E+2005%2E+Annotating+Expressions+of+Opinions+and+Emotions+in+Language%2E+Language+Resources+and+Evaluation%2C+volume+39%2C+issue+203%2C+pages+1663%2D210%2E)

*Updated 2 November 2026*