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# The Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English: First Parsing Results and Analysis

**Authors:** [Seth Kulick](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/seth-kulick/), [Anthony Kroch](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/anthony-kroch/) and [Beatrice Santorini](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/beatrice-santorini/) · **Year:** 2014 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/P14-2108](https://aclanthology.org/P14-2108/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) — summary only

[**19** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2251948173) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**5** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/aclbulk-2014-kulick-penn-parsed-corpus-modern-british/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/P14-2/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/P14-2108/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/P14-2108.pdf)
- [DOI 10.3115/v1/p14-2108](https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/p14-2108)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2251948173)

**Authors (3)**

1. [Seth Kulick](https://openalex.org/A5090150146) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1376-4902) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2695965) · h 15 · 1114 citations · 139 works
2. [Anthony Kroch](https://openalex.org/A5083284640) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/33408121) · h 19 · 4147 citations · 69 works
3. [Beatrice Santorini](https://openalex.org/A5023146320) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2424234) · h 14 · 2138 citations · 47 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex-snapshot (2026-10-14); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The PPCMBE is a historical treebank of British English from 1700 to 1914. After seven legal files are left out, 94 files with 1,018,736 tokens remain. Its annotation is close to the Penn Treebank but has flatter clauses (no VP level) and different coordination and NP structure. The authors train the Berkeley parser on several versions of the corpus, with and without added NP and VP brackets. The best version reaches an F-score of 84.7 on dev and 85.5 on test, a little below the PTB. Sentences up to 40 words score 2.4 points higher than all sentences. Parser errors include IP nodes that the gold trees do not have, and clauses with two main verbs.

## Ideas

- I1. `en parse-eval`: report LAS and root accuracy for sentences up to 40 words and for all sentences, as the paper does. Measure on EWT test with two identical runs before claiming any change.
- I2. `en ud-check`: add a rule that flags a clause with two finite main verbs, the parser error type the paper finds. Count the flags on the `en` output for EWT test, and check a sample by hand.
- I3. `en/src/parse.rs`: compare parses made with gold tags and with own tags, and report the gap per corpus. The paper finds the gap larger on the test section; check whether EWT shows the same pattern.

## For Mova

The chapters are [21. The simple clause](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/21-clause-structure/) and [22. Phrases: noun, adjective, adverb and prepositional phrases](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/22-phrases/) (NP and coordination). The code is `en/src/parse.rs`, `en parse-eval` and `en ud-check`. The PPCMBE is LDC data under NC terms: use it for tests only. The English figures must come from EWT test.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.3115/v1/p14-2108](https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/p14-2108)

```
@inproceedings{kulick2014penn,
  title = {{The Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English: First Parsing Results and Analysis}},
  author = {Kulick, Seth and Kroch, Anthony and Santorini, Beatrice},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 52nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.3115/v1/p14-2108},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/p14-2108}
}
```

- [← previous A Dependency Parser for Tweets](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2014-kong-dependency-parser-tweets/)
- [next → A* CCG Parsing with a Supertag-factored Model](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2014-lewis-ccg-parsing-supertag-factored-model/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

## References

14 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Ann Bies, Justin Mott, Colin Warner, and Seth Kulick. 2012. English Web Treebank. LDC2012T13. Linguistic Data Consortium. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ann+Bies%2C+Justin+Mott%2C+Colin+Warner%2C+and+Seth+Kulick%2E+2012%2E+English+Web+Treebank%2E+LDC2012T13%2E+Linguistic+Data+Consortium%2E)
2. Charlotte Galves and Pabol Faria. 2010. Tycho Brahe Parsed Corpus of Historical Portuguese. [http://www.tycho.iel.unicamp.br/˜tycho/corpus/en/index.html](http://www.tycho.iel.unicamp.br/˜tycho/corpus/en/index.html). [↗](http://www.tycho.iel.unicamp.br/˜tycho/corpus/en/index.html)
3. Anthony Kroch and Ann Taylor. 2000. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second edition. [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-3/index.html](http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-3/index.html). [↗](http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCME2-RELEASE-3/index.html)
4. Anthony Kroch, Beatrice Santorini, and Ariel Diertani. 2004. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English. [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCEME-RELEASE-2/index.html](http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCEME-RELEASE-2/index.html). [↗](http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCEME-RELEASE-2/index.html)
5. Anthony Kroch, Beatrice Santorini, and Ariel Diertani. 2010. Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English. [http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCMBE-RELEASE-1/](http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCMBE-RELEASE-1/) index.html. [↗](http://www.ling.upenn.edu/hist-corpora/PPCMBE-RELEASE-1/)
6. Yuri Lin, Jean-Baptiste Michel, Erez Aiden Lieberman, Jon Orwant, Will Brockman, and Slav Petrov. 2012. Syntactic annotations for the google books ngram corpus. In Proceedings of the ACL 2012 System Demonstrations, pages 169–174, Jeju Island, Korea, July. Association for Computational Linguistics. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Yuri+Lin%2C+Jean%2DBaptiste+Michel%2C+Erez+Aiden+Lieberman%2C+Jon+Orwant%2C+Will+Brockman%2C+and+Slav+Petrov%2E+2012%2E+Syntactic+annotations+for+the+google+books+ngram+corpus%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+ACL+2012+System+D)
7. Mitchell P. Marcus, Beatrice Santorini, Mary Ann Marcinkiewicz, and Ann Taylor. 1999. Treebank-3. LDC99T42, Linguistic Data Consortium, Philadelphia. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Mitchell+P%2E+Marcus%2C+Beatrice+Santorini%2C+Mary+Ann+Marcinkiewicz%2C+and+Ann+Taylor%2E+1999%2E+Treebank%2D3%2E+LDC99T42%2C+Linguistic+Data+Consortium%2C+Philadelphia%2E)
8. France Martineau et al. 2009. Modéliser le changement: les voies du français, a Parsed Corpus of Historical French. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=France+Martineau+et+al%2E+2009%2E+Mode%CC%81liser+le+changement%3A+les+voies+du+franc%CC%A7ais%2C+a+Parsed+Corpus+of+Historical+French%2E)
9. Slav Petrov, Leon Barrett, Romain Thibaux, and Dan Klein. 2006. Learning accurate, compact, and interpretable tree annotation. In Proceedings of COLING-ACL, pages 433–440, Sydney, Australia, July. Association for Computational Linguistics. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Slav+Petrov%2C+Leon+Barrett%2C+Romain+Thibaux%2C+and+Dan+Klein%2E+2006%2E+Learning+accurate%2C+compact%2C+and+interpretable+tree+annotation%2E+In+Proceedings+of+COLING%2DACL%2C+pages+433%E2%80%93440%2C+Sydney%2C+Australia%2C+July%2E+Ass) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/aclbulk-2006-petrov-learning-accurate-compact-interpretable-tree/)
10. Slav Petrov, Leon Barrett, Romain Thibaux, and Dan Klein. 2008. The Berkeley Parser. [https://code.google.com/p/berkeleyparser/](https://code.google.com/p/berkeleyparser/). [↗](https://code.google.com/p/berkeleyparser/)
11. Satoshi Sekine and Michael Collins. 2008. Evalb. [http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/evalb/](http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/evalb/). [↗](http://nlp.cs.nyu.edu/evalb/)
12. Ann Taylor, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Frank Beths. 2003. The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose. Distributed through the Oxford Text Archive. [http://www-users.york.ac.uk/˜lang22/YCOE/YcoeHome.htm](http://www-users.york.ac.uk/˜lang22/YCOE/YcoeHome.htm). [↗](http://www-users.york.ac.uk/˜lang22/YCOE/YcoeHome.htm)
13. Ann Taylor, Arja Nurmi, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Terttu Nevalainen. 2006. Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence. Compiled by the CEEC Project Team. York: University of York and Helsinki: University of Helsinki. Distributed through the Oxford Text Archive. [http://www-users.york.ac.uk/˜lang22/PCEEC-manual/index.htm](http://www-users.york.ac.uk/˜lang22/PCEEC-manual/index.htm). [↗](http://www-users.york.ac.uk/˜lang22/PCEEC-manual/index.htm)
14. Joel Wallenberg, Anton Karl Ingason, Einar Freyr Sigursson, and Eirkur Rgnvaldsson. 2011. Icelandic Parsed Historical Corpus (IcePaHC) version 0.4. [http://www.linguist.is/icelandic_treebank](http://www.linguist.is/icelandic_treebank). [↗](http://www.linguist.is/icelandic_treebank)