From TreeBank to PropBank

Paul Kingsbury (University of Pennsylvania)

Martha Palmer (University of Pennsylvania)

WO21: Treebanks

This paper describes our approach to the development of a Proposition Bank, which involves the addition of semantic information to the Penn English Treebank. Our primary goal is the labeling of syntactic nodes with specific argument labels that preserve the similarity of roles such as the window in John broke the window and the window broke. After motivating the need for explicit predicate argument structure labels, we briefly discuss the theoretical considerations of predicate argument structure and the need to maintain consistency across syntactic alternations. The issues of consistency of argument structure across both polysemous and synonymous verbs are also discussed and we present our actual guidelines for these types of phenomena, along with numerous examples of tagged sentences and verb frames. Metaframes are introduced as a technique for handling similar frames among near-synonymous verbs. We conclude with a summary of the current status of annotation process.

Treebank

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