  Language provides speakers with a rich system of modality for expressing
thoughts about events, without being committed to their actual occurrence.
Modality is commonly used in the political news domain, where both actual and
possible courses of events are discussed. NLP systems struggle with these
semantic phenomena, often incorrectly extracting events which did not happen,
which can lead to issues in downstream applications. We present an open-domain,
lexicon-based event extraction system that captures various types of modality.
This information is valuable for Question Answering, Knowledge Graph
construction and Fact-checking tasks, and our evaluation shows that the system
is sufficiently strong to be used in downstream applications.
