  Understanding linguistic modality is widely seen as important for downstream
tasks such as Question Answering and Knowledge Graph Population. Entailment
Graph learning might also be expected to benefit from attention to modality. We
build Entailment Graphs using a news corpus filtered with a modality parser,
and show that stripping modal modifiers from predicates in fact increases
performance. This suggests that for some tasks, the pragmatics of modal
modification of predicates allows them to contribute as evidence of entailment.
