Hedging and Speaker Commitment

Hedging is a behavior wherein speakers or writers attempt to distance themselves from the proposition they are communicating. Hedge terms include items such as ”I think X” or ”It’s sort of Y”. Identifying such behaviors is important for extracting meaning from speech and text, and can also reveal information about the social and power relations between the conversants. Yet little research has been done on the automatic identification of hedges since the CONLL 2010 Shared Task. In this paper, we present our newly expanded and generalized guidelines for the annotation of hedge expressions in text and speech. We describe annotation and automatic extraction experiments using these guidelines and describe future work on the automatic identification of hedges.