Enunciative and modal variations in newswire texts in French: From guideline to automatic annotation

In this paper we present the development of a corpus of French newswire texts annotated with enunciative and modal commitment information. The annotation scheme we propose is based on the detection of predicative cues referring to an enunciative and/or modal variation and their scope at a sentence level. We describe how we have improved our annotation guideline by using the evaluation (in terms of precision, recall and F-Measure) of a first round of annotation produced by two expert annotators and by our automatic annotation system.