Modal Dependency Parsing as Structured Prediction over Source-Cue Scope

AbstractModal dependency parsing-the task of identifying a semantic graph that represents who is responsible for an event-centered claim and with what degree of certainty-relies on recognizing source-introducing cues and correctly linking them to their associated content. However, prior work has largely focused on identifying sources only, treating cue expressions and their modal coverage as auxiliary signals. In this work, we propose a structured prediction framework that leverages large language models (LLMs) to explicitly identify source-cue pairs as well as their respective scope, which together define the modal contexts governing downstream source attribution for events. By concentrating learning at the source-cue level and constraining event-level decisions to a small, scope-defined candidate set, our top-down approach enables more efficient inference in long, event-rich documents. Experiments show this approach surpasses prior state-of-the-art results by 3 and 4% for English and Chinese datasets, respectively.