Abstract
In this paper we describe a “distant annotation” method by which we mark up tense and modality of Chinese eventualities via a word-aligned parallel corpus. We first map Chinese verbs to their English counterpart via word alignment, and then annotate the resulting English text spans with coarse-grained tense and modality categories that we believe apply to both English and Chinese. Because English has richer morpho-syntactic indicators for tense and modality than Chinese, we hope this distant annotation approach will yield more consistent annotation than if we annotate the Chinese side directly. We report experimental results that show this expectation is largely borne out.