Part 5 — Engagement tagging: Rules and Spans

Table of Contents

  1. Annotation procedure
    1. 1. Clause boundary detection
      1. Part of Speech layers.
    2. 2. Modal sense disambiguation
    3. 3. Engagement annotation
      1. 3a. Primary engagement strategies
        1. MONOGLOSS should be used when JUSTIFY and CITATION is the only other moves.
      2. 3b. Secondary engagement strategies
      3. Additional tips
      4. Functional perspective
      5. Structural perspective
  2. Procedure at work

Annotation procedure

Updated on May 7th, 2022

1. Clause boundary detection

For each sentence, annotation should start with clause boundary segmengation and clause type identification. I will not repeat the content here, but you should refer to the clause boundary detection for details.

Part of Speech layers.

You can refer to Part-Of-Speech (POS) tags automatically generated by spaCy during the annotation. There are two layers in the POS annotation. One is coarse-grained (UPOS); the other is finer-grained (XPOS). For UPOS, see the following documentation from Universal Dependency project. For XPOS, see the following table from spaCy documentation on POS scheme.

2. Modal sense disambiguation

Once a sentence has been annotated for clause boundary and types, we will annotate the sense of modal verbs (if any). This will allow us to prepare for the following engagement annotation because although most modal verbs function as entertain it is not always the case.

See Modal sense Disambiguation for details of this step.

3. Engagement annotation

When you annotate a sentence for Engagement, we first focus on identifying primary engagement strategy in a sentence. This is followed by tagging secondary engagement strategies. To decide the categories of engagement, see Engagement category.

3a. Primary engagement strategies

Primary engagement strategies are those that characterize the engagement of a MAIN clause. This means that a construction with an engagement meaning (a) occurs within the MAIN clause but not in an EMBEDDED clause OR (b) corresponds to the span of a SUBORDINATE clause.

Consider the following monoglossic utterance:

The best method to understand how language proficiency develops is to look at large-scale observations from various sources.

This utterance is monoglossic because the writer uses present tense ‘is’ to present the idea as if it is a fact. This is called a bare assertion (= Monogloss).

Primary engagement strategies will change the “tone” of this statement, either expand or contract the discourse:

  • In my opinion (ENTERTAIN), the best method to understand how language proficiency develops is to look at large-scale observations from various sources.
  • Perhaps (ENTERTAIN), the best method to understand how language proficiency develops be to look at large-scale observations from various sources.
  • The best method to understand how language proficiency develops would (ENTERTAIN) be to look at large-scale observations from various sources.
  • Researchers proposed (ATTRIBUTE) that the best method to understand how language proficiency develops is to look at large-scale observations from various sources.
  • Although it takes a great amount of effort (COUNTER), the best method to understand how language proficiency develops is to look at large-scale observations from various sources.

MONOGLOSS should be used when JUSTIFY and CITATION is the only other moves.

Because Justify and Citation is treated as auxiliary engagement moves, we will tag MONOGLOSS to indicate that the sentence itself is presented monoglossic. For example:

  • I decided (MONOGLOSS) to writer a letter to the author because the figure contained an error (JUSTIFY).

The reason for this is that Justify and Citation is not determine the engagement of the whole clause (they are neither expand or contract the discourse).

3b. Secondary engagement strategies

Secondary engagement strategies occur in the EMBEDDED or SUBORDINATE clauses. They do not affect the overall engagement strategy of the sentence, but still contribute to the discourse to some extent.

Even the primary strategy is monoglossic, the sentence can still have secondary engagement strategies.

  • The best method to understand how language proficiency may (ENTERTAIN) develop is (MONOGLOSS) to look at large-scale observations from various sources.

In this example, the primary engagement strategy is monoglossic because there is no engagement resources that satisfies the criteria of primary engagement strategy defined above. However, it still has a modal verb (may) in an EMBEDDED clause. This modal very takes on secondary engagement (or ENTERTAIN category) in the sentence. It does not influence the overall clausal strategy, but still be considered entertaining the presupposed idea of the sentence.

Additional tips

The following steps are meant to help you to look for potential linguistic structures that engagement strategy can surface. This is not an exhaustive list, so they should be used as only a recommended guidance.

Functional perspective

  1. Does the sentence hedge their statement (e.g., expression of likelihood)?
  2. Does the sentence refer to any external sources (ATTRIBUTE or ENDORSE)? (see Endorse vs Attribute)
  3. Does the sentence assert their own point of view WITHOUT recognition to others (i.e., Monogloss)?
  4. Does the sentence recognize alternative view so as to disclaim (DENY or COUNTER)?

Structural perspective

  1. Look out for any verbs in the main clause; Are they potentially engagement item (e.g., say, believe); Who says or believes?
  2. Look for any conjunctions and adverbial phrases in the main clauses.
  3. Look for any modal verbs, negative particles.
  4. Does the sentence cite any sources?

Procedure at work

Consider the following example:

The question I will seek to answer is not whether schools should offer curricular choice.

This sentence is annotated for clause types as follows: example-clause

  1. First, we look for any engagement in the main clause (= see Primary engagement strategy). In this case we have not in the main clause, which is DENY.

  2. Next, we look at the two embedded clauses. We find modal verbs in both clauses, so we need to think about the in which sense these are used.

    • We consider that the first one is more related to willingness and temporal meaning than, for example, epistemic. So, we do not think this one is ENTERTAIN.
    • On the other hand, the second modal verb should is used in the deontic sense, which suggests that it can be considered ENTERTAIN.

Going through this process, the annotation for this example sentence will look like: example-annotated