Figureswhether

Figureswhether is a term used in linguistics and data annotation to describe sentences that mention numerical figures while explicitly signaling uncertainty, contingency, or variation in the value. It refers to the practice of pairing a numeric figure with qualifiers, clauses, or context that indicate the figure may be approximate, conditional, or dependent on methodology. In corpus work, figureswhether labeling helps capture how numbers are presented and interpreted in real-world text.

Etymology and scope: The word combines figures (numbers) and whether (the conditional marker), reflecting the idea that the stated figure may depend on certain conditions or choices. The term is not universally standardized and appears mainly in discussions of annotation schemes and natural language processing (NLP) for numeric data. Different corpora and projects may define figureswhether criteria slightly differently, but the core idea is a dedicated label for uncertainty around numeric values.

Applications and methods: In data extraction and NLP, figureswhether annotations are used to attach meta-information to numerals. Tags may indicate whether a figure is exact, approximate, or conditional, and may accompany ranges, hedges (about, approximately), or explicit whether-clauses. This helps downstream tasks such as uncertainty quantification, data integration, and risk assessment by making numeric reliability explicit to models and users.

Examples: "The population is 1.2 million, whether seasonally adjusted or not." "Projected revenue is 3.5 billion, whether quarterly or annualized." "The figure stands at 2.7 thousand, whether counted in local or regional terms." These illustrate how numbers and conditionality co-occur.

See also: Uncertainty in data, Numerical information extraction, Data annotation, Natural language processing.