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

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 5730–5738 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 5730 Must Children be Vaccinated or not? Annotating Modal Verbs in the Vaccination Debate Liza King and Roser Morante CLTL Lab, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam De Boelelaan 1105, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands e.a.king@student@vu.nl, r.morantevallejo@vu.nl Abstract The study of modal verbs in the growing vaccination debate reveals important insights into perspectives on vaccination: must children be vaccinated or are parents allowed not to vaccinate? How strong are the recommendations by pro- and anti-vaccination supporters? We present experimental work on annotation of modal verbs and their senses in texts related to the vaccination debate, as well as the resulting corpus. The results from our pilot study suggest that the most frequent type of modality was epistemic – indicating that participants in the debate appear to be more concerned with the safety and efficacy of vaccines than with moral arguments. Those against vaccination appear to be more committed or convinced of their views than those in favor, as evidenced by the use of the modal must. Keywords: modality, annotation, vaccination debate 1. Introduction In this paper we analyze the use of modal verbs in a corpus of texts related to the vaccination debate. Broadly speak- ing, the vaccination debate centers around whether vaccines are safe, and whether it is morally acceptable to enforce mandatory vaccination (Wolfe and Sharp, 2002; Mollema et al., 2015). 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 pub- lic perception of the safety and necessity of vaccines. Pub- lic perception can relate to the strength of conviction that an individual may have towards a proposition (e.g. ‘one must1 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 aux- iliaries 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. The two central arguments of the vaccination debate re- late to epistemic and dynamic modality (the safety of vac- cines), as well as deontic modality (relating to permission and obligation to vaccinate), as exemplified in the following excerpt: 1. “This cannot just be a debate about health statistics. It’s really a debate about who takes care of our children. It’s become na¨ıve and pass´e to believe it should be the parents’ responsibility! Yet the parents have to live with the mess forever afterwards, if a vaccination goes wrong and produces serious damage to the child. And when I talk about mess, I’m talking incapacitating neurological damage by vaccines, which can be severe and permanent.” (Scott-Mumby, 2015) Modality can be defined as …

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