Must Children be Vaccinated or not? Annotating Modal Verbs in the Vaccination Debate

In this paper we analyze the use of modal verbs in a corpus of texts related to the vaccination debate. Broadly speaking, the vaccination debate centers around whether vaccination is safe, and whether it is morally acceptable to enforce mandatory vaccination. In order to successfully intervene and curb the spread of preventable diseases due to low vaccination rates, health practitioners need to be adequately informed on public perception of the safety and necessity of vaccines. Public perception can relate to the strength of conviction that an individual may have towards a proposition (e.g. {`}one must vaccinate{'} versus {`}one should vaccinate{'}), as well as qualify the type of proposition, be it related to morality ({`}government should not interfere in my personal choice{'}) or related to possibility ({`}too many vaccines at once could hurt my child{'}). Text mining and analysis of modal auxiliaries are economically viable means of gaining insights into these perspectives, particularly on a large scale due to the widespread use of social media and blogs as vehicles of communication.