Modality over Contemporary History Schoolbooks in French

INRIA Sémagramme 2025 SIR01 Submission5 Authors

Keywords: modality, annotation schema, text classification, textbook, schoolbook

TL;DR: Automatic detection of modality in french history textbooks

Abstract: This paper investigates the analysis of modality in French. We use an annotation schema encompassing epistemic, deontic, appreciative, and inter-enunciators modalities. Using a fine-tuned CamemBERT model for multilabel classification, we achieve a strong weighted F1-score of 0.92, despite challenges with class imbalance. A classification experiment using this model on contemporary textbooks from two major French publishers reveals significant prevalence of appreciative and inter-enunciators modalities, with notable increases in appreciative judgments at higher educational levels.

Submission Number: 5