Do You Believe It Happened? Assessing Chinese Readers’ Veridicality Judgments

Abstract

This work collects and studies Chinese readers’ veridicality judgments to news events (whether an event is viewed as happening or not). For instance, in “The FBI alleged in court documents that Zazi had admitted having a handwritten recipe for explosives on his computer”, do people believe that Zazi had a handwritten recipe for explosives? The goal is to observe the pragmatic behaviors of linguistic features under context which affects readers in making veridicality judgments. Exploring from the datasets, it is found that features such as event-selecting predicates (ESP), modality markers, adverbs, temporal information, and statistics have an impact on readers’ veridicality judgments. We further investigated that modality markers with high certainty do not necessarily trigger readers to have high confidence in believing an event happened. Additionally, the source of information introduced by an ESP presents low effects to veridicality judgments, even when an event is attributed to an authority (e.g. “The FBI”). A corpus annotated with Chinese readers’ veridicality judgments is released as the Chinese PragBank for further analysis.