As an alternative to subjective and informal expert opinions, we here propose to ground natural language expressions for epistemic modality, such as "possibly", or "might indicate", in empirical data solicited from members of the speakers' community in epistemic judgment tasks. In an online questionnaire study, we asked 86 subjects to rate the degree of certainty of propositions relative to 27 linguistic expressions. Based on a thorough statistical analysis of the responses we received, we are able to quantify the likelihood as well as ranges of certainty associated with these propositions. Moreover, we generalize these data in terms of an empirically motivated, tri-partite category system of expression sets for prepositional certainty which can be reused, e.g. for standardizing annotation guidelines.
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