The MegaVeridicality dataset

Authors: Aaron Steven White and Kyle Rawlins

Contact: aaron.white@rochester.edu, kgr@jhu.edu

Version: 2.0-alpha

Release date: May 23, 2018

Overview

This dataset consists of ordinal veridicality judgments as well as ordinal acceptability judgments for 773 clause-embedding verbs of English. The data were collected on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk using Turktools.

For a detailed description of the dataset, the item construction and collection methods, and discussion of how to use a dataset on this scale to address questions in linguistic theory, please see the following papers:

White, A. S., R. Rudinger, K. Rawlins, & B. Van Durme. 2018. Lexicosyntactic Inference in Neural Models. To appear in Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Brussels, Belgium, October 31-November 4, 2018.

White, A. S. & K. Rawlins. 2018. The role of veridicality and factivity in clause selection. To appear in the Proceedings of the 48th Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society.

If you make use of this dataset in a presentation or publication, we ask that you please cite these papers.

Version history

1.0: first public release (May 11, 2018) 2.0: alpha release (May 23, 2018)

Manifest

• megaveridicality_v2.csv
• megaveridicality_normalized_v2.csv
• README.md

Description

megaveridicality_v2.csv contains the raw data collected on Mechanical Turk.

Column Description Values
participant anonymous integer identifier for participant that provided the response 0…634
list integer identifier for list participant was responding to 0…81
presentationorder relative position of item in list 1…68
verb clause-embedding verb found in the item see paper
frame clausal complement found in the item see paper
voice voice found in the item active, passive
polarity polarity found in the item positive, negative
conditional whether the item was embedded in the antecedent of a conditional (see paper) True, False
sentence the sentence judged see paper
veridicality ordinal scale veridicality response no, maybe, yes
acceptability ordinal scale acceptability response 1…7
nativeenglish whether the participant reported speaking American English natively True, False
exclude whether the participant should be excluded based on native language True, False

megaveridicality_normalized_v2.csv contains normalized veridicality and acceptability ratings, one for each verb-frame-voice-polarity tuple. These normalized ratings are constructed using an ordinal model-based normalization procedure and can be thought of as mean ratings that control for participants’ differing uses of the relevant response scale. The mean log-likelihood for the 10 ratings given for each verb-frame-voice-polarity tuple under the ordinal model used to normalize the data is also given. This can be thought of as analogous to an estimate of rating variance.

Column Description Values
verb clause-embedding verb found in the item see paper
frame clausal complement found in the item see paper
voice voice found in the item active, passive
polarity polarity found in the item positive, negative
conditional whether the item was embedded in the antecedent of a conditional (see paper) True, False
sentence the sentence judged see paper
veridicality_normalized the normalized veridicality rating [-3.52, 1.87]
acceptability_normalized the normalized acceptability rating [-2.85, 3.16]
veridicality_loglikelihood the sentence judged [-1.74, 0.00]
acceptability_loglikelihood the sentence judged [-2.60, -0.06]

Notes

• A javascript error produced 3 NA values for veridicality, none of which affect the same verb-frame pair.