Must Children be Vaccinated or not? Annotating Modal Verbs in the Vaccination Debate

Liza King, Roser Morante


Abstract
In this paper we analyze the use of modal verbs in a corpus of texts related to the vaccination debate. Broadly speaking, the vaccination debate centers around whether vaccination is safe, and whether it is morally acceptable to enforce mandatory vaccination. In order to successfully intervene and curb the spread of preventable diseases due to low vaccination rates, health practitioners need to be adequately informed on public perception of the safety and necessity of vaccines. Public perception can relate to the strength of conviction that an individual may have towards a proposition (e.g. ‘one must vaccinate’ versus ‘one should vaccinate’), as well as qualify the type of proposition, be it related to morality (‘government should not interfere in my personal choice’) or related to possibility (‘too many vaccines at once could hurt my child’). Text mining and analysis of modal auxiliaries are economically viable means of gaining insights into these perspectives, particularly on a large scale due to the widespread use of social media and blogs as vehicles of communication.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.703
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
5730–5738
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.703
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liza King and Roser Morante. 2020. Must Children be Vaccinated or not? Annotating Modal Verbs in the Vaccination Debate. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5730–5738, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Must Children be Vaccinated or not? Annotating Modal Verbs in the Vaccination Debate (King & Morante, LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.703.pdf