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# The LinGO Redwoods Treebank: Motivation and Preliminary Applications

**Authors:** [Stephan Oepen](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/stephan-oepen/), [Kristina Toutanova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/kristina-toutanova/), [Stuart Shieber](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/stuart-shieber/), [Christopher Manning](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/christopher-manning/), [Dan Flickinger](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/dan-flickinger/) and [Thorsten Brants](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/thorsten-brants/) · **Year:** 2002 · **Venue:** COLING 2002: The 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Project Notes **Link:** [aclanthology.org/C02-2025](https://aclanthology.org/C02-2025/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**135** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2067349145) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**78** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/bank-2002-oepen-lingo-redwoods-treebank-motivation-preliminary/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[COLING 2002: The 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Project Notes](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/C02-2/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/C02-2025/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/C02-2025.pdf)
- [DOI 10.3115/1071884.1071909](https://doi.org/10.3115/1071884.1071909)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2067349145)

**Authors (6)**

1. [Stephan Oepen](https://openalex.org/A5058412010) h 35 · 3542 citations · 215 works
2. [Kristina Toutanova](https://openalex.org/A5053947885) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0009-0005-3458-9049) · h 44 · 46381 citations · 150 works
3. [Stuart Shieber](https://openalex.org/A5053102850) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7733-8195) · h 50 · 10398 citations · 191 works
4. [Christopher Manning](https://openalex.org/A5046006076) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6155-649X) · h 139 · 180101 citations · 770 works
5. [Dan Flickinger](https://openalex.org/A5089106912) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7959-999X) · h 31 · 5030 citations · 90 works
6. [Thorsten Brants](https://openalex.org/A5076738898) h 28 · 5106 citations · 66 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 paper proposes a treebank that stores full HPSG analyses from a broad-coverage grammar (the LinGO English Resource Grammar) instead of one fixed tree format, so that users can extract the representation they need. Annotators do not draw trees. They see the parses the grammar gives and choose the preferred one by answering short binary questions about its properties (discriminants). The choices are kept, so that they can be replayed when the grammar changes. The first sentences come from VerbMobil dialogues, and one second-year undergraduate finished the first round in under ten weeks. For parse ranking, a PCFG over derivation trees with grandparent annotation, plus a tag-sequence trigram, picks the right parse for 74.03% of ambiguous sentences (random 25.81%), but only 45.33% of sentences with 20 or more analyses. Ranking derivation trees (71.73%) beats ranking phrase structure trees with the same model (65.65%).

## Ideas

- I1. `treebanks` and `tools/treeagree`: keep, for each accepted choice on a silver tree, the property that decided it (the attachment, the label, the lemma). When `en` changes, replay the stored choices on the new candidate parses and count how many still select one analysis, and how many change. The paper names this as the main maintenance problem. Measure on the school silver sentences, twice, with identical results before any claim.
- I2. Ambiguity buckets for the `en` beam: when the parser keeps several trees for a sentence, rank them by a UPOS trigram and by the parser score, and report accuracy against EWT gold in the paper's buckets (2 or more, 5 or more, 10 or more, 20 or more candidates). Use only EWT test sentences where the beam gives more than one tree, so that the comparison is on ambiguous input.
- I3. Split the ranking error, as the paper's oracle row does: give the ranker the gold UPOS sequence and see how much accuracy comes back. Mova's `parse-eval` already prints scores with gold tags and with its own tags; this idea extends the same split to the ranking of alternative trees.

## For Mova

The chapters are [20. Syntax: the Universal Dependencies frame](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/20-syntax-overview/) (ambiguity and attachment) and [22. Phrases: noun, adjective, adverb and prepositional phrases](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/22-phrases/). The code is `en/src/parse.rs` (the beam), `en/src/explain.rs` (a reason for each decision) and `tools/treeagree`. The Redwoods and VerbMobil material have their own terms: check [Data and model licences](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/licence/DATA/) before any use, and use restricted material for tests only. No Redwoods data is in the repo.

Topics: [Treebanks](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/treebanks/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.3115/1071884.1071909](https://doi.org/10.3115/1071884.1071909)

```
@inproceedings{oepen2002lingo,
  title = {{The LinGO Redwoods Treebank: Motivation and Preliminary Applications}},
  author = {Oepen, Stephan and Toutanova, Kristina and Shieber, Stuart and Manning, Christopher and Flickinger, Dan and Brants, Thorsten},
  booktitle = {COLING 2002: The 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Project Notes},
  year = {2002},
  doi = {10.3115/1071884.1071909},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.3115/1071884.1071909}
}
```

- [← previous The Penn Treebank: Annotating Predicate Argument Structure](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/bank-1994-marcus-penn-treebank-annotating-predicate-argument/)
- [next → A Dependency Treebank for English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/bank-2002-rambow-dependency-treebank-english/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

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18 references, 2 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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12. Harris, T. E. (1963). The theory of branching processes. Berlin, Germany: Springer. [↗](https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-51866-9)
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