Library and Information Science Commons^™

Certainty Categorization Model, Elizabeth D. Liddy, Noriko Kando, Victoria L. Rubin

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

We present a theoretical framework and preliminary results for manual categorization of explicit certainty information in 32 English newspaper articles. The explicit certainty markers were identified and categorized according to the four hypothesized dimensions – perspective, focus, timeline, and level of certainty. One hundred twenty one sentences from sample news stories contained a significantly lower frequency of markers per sentence (M=0.46, SD =0.04) than 564 sentences from sample editorials (M=0.6, SD =0.23), p= 0.0056, two-tailed heteroscedastic t-test. Within each dimension, editorials had most numerous markers per sentence in high level of certainty, writer’s point of view, and future and present …