Mu-Jung Cho

Factuality, defined as the degree of certainty about the factual status of a situation or an event, is one of the fundamental factors in several applied research fields such as machine translation and claim detection. This project will develop a lexicon-based method for factuality classification based on the theories and literature in computational linguistics. Previous work on factuality and other related concepts, such as modality, evidentiality, and uncertainty, have focused mainly on the sentence level and well-formed language data. Text analysis at the sentence level cannot cope with non-standard language data containing tokens that do not form sentences. In focusing on the word-level lexical analysis, this project represents one of the first attempts in dealing with non-standard language use, such as the language used in texting and social media platforms, in factuality research.