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# A Dependency Treebank for English

**Authors:** [Owen Rambow](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/owen-rambow/), Cassandre Creswell, Rachel Szekely, Harriet Taber and [Marilyn Walker](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/marilyn-walker/) · **Year:** 2002 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L02-1325](https://aclanthology.org/L02-1325/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) — summary only

[**14** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/bank-2002-rambow-dependency-treebank-english/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L02-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L02-1325/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L02-1325.pdf)

**Authors (5)**

1. Owen Rambow
2. Cassandre Creswell
3. Rachel Szekely
4. Harriet Taber
5. Marilyn Walker

Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper describes the syntactic layer of the ISLE project, a small corpus of about 13,000 words of transcribed travel-agent speech with multiple annotation levels. The authors choose dependency rather than phrase structure because predicate-argument structure is what applications need, and because phrase-structure treebanks such as the Penn Treebank need head-percolation heuristics to get it. The annotation is a single monostratal dependency level with no separate surface tree; function words attach to their lexical heads, so auxiliaries depend on the main verb. Each word carries a surface role and a deep role. On one 272-word dialogue, inter-annotator agreement is 93 to 94% for POS and features, 95% for the surface role, and at least 99% for the other fields. The paper reports a pace of about 30 words per hour.

## Ideas

- I1. Per-field agreement report: adopt the paper's field-by-field agreement table (POS, features, role) for the `annot` silver checks, computed on 300 EWT sentences between Haiku and Opus output, so that the weak fields are visible per batch.
- I2. Spoken-dialogue probe: report LAS on the ATIS queries (current 63.0, lowercased) split by whether the sentence contains an auxiliary or a fronted wh-word, since these are the constructions the paper works through.
- I3. Dialogue test set (no training): build a held-out set of short dialogue turns in `treebanks/en/` from material we are free to use, to test `en` on speech-like input; keep it out of the training pool.

## For Mova

The code is `annot` (batch annotation and its gates) and `en parse-eval` for the probe. The chapters are [26. Questions](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/26-questions/) (wh-questions and inversion) and `37-register-and-variation.md` (speech-like registers). The paper's main lesson for Mova is that per-field agreement, not one overall score, decides where the teacher is trusted.

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.

```
@inproceedings{rambow2002dependency,
  title = {{A Dependency Treebank for English}},
  author = {Rambow, Owen and Creswell, Cassandre and Szekely, Rachel and Taber, Harriet and Walker, Marilyn},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02)},
  year = {2002},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/L02-1325/}
}
```

- [← previous The LinGO Redwoods Treebank: Motivation and Preliminary Applications](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/bank-2002-oepen-lingo-redwoods-treebank-motivation-preliminary/)
- [next → Using the Penn Treebank to Evaluate Non-Treebank Parsers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/bank-2004-ringger-penn-treebank-evaluate-non-treebank/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

## References

14 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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2. Srinivas Bangalore and Owen Rambow. 2000. Exploiting a probabilistic hierarchical model for generation. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 2000), Saarbrücken, Germany. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Srinivas+Bangalore+and+Owen+Rambow%2E+2000%2E+Exploiting+a+probabilistic+hierarchical+model+for+generation%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+18th+International+Conference+on+Computational+Linguistics+%28COLING+2000%29%2C+)
3. Alena Böhmová, Jan Hajič, Eva Hajičová, and Barbora Hladká. 2001. The Prague Dependency Treebank: Three-Level Annotation Scenario. In Anne Abeillé, editor, Treebanks: Building and Using Syntactically Annotated Corpora. Kluwer Academic Publishers. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Alena+Bo%CC%88hmova%CC%81%2C+Jan+Hajic%CC%8C%2C+Eva+Hajic%CC%8Cova%CC%81%2C+and+Barbora+Hladka%CC%81%2E+2001%2E+The+Prague+Dependency+Treebank%3A+Three%2DLevel+Annotation+Scenario%2E+In+Anne+Abeille%CC%81%2C+editor%2C+Treebanks%3A+Building+and+Using+Syntact)
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5. Jan Hajic, Eva Hajicová, Martin Holub, Petr Pajas, Petr Sgall, Barbora Vidová-Hladká, and Veronika eznícková. 2001. The current status of the prague dependency treebank. In LNAI 2166, LNAI 2166, pages 11–20. Springer Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, New York. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Jan+Hajic%2C+Eva+Hajicova%CC%81%2C+Martin+Holub%2C+Petr+Pajas%2C+Petr+Sgall%2C+Barbora+Vidova%CC%81%2DHladka%CC%81%2C+and+Veronika+ezni%CC%81ckova%CC%81%2E+2001%2E+The+current+status+of+the+prague+dependency+treebank%2E+In+LNAI+2166%2C+LNAI+2166%2C+)
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9. Mitchell M. Marcus, Beatrice Santorini, and Mary Ann Marcinkiewicz. 1993. Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English: The Penn Treebank. Computational Linguistics, 19.2:313–330, June. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Mitchell+M%2E+Marcus%2C+Beatrice+Santorini%2C+and+Mary+Ann+Marcinkiewicz%2E+1993%2E+Building+a+Large+Annotated+Corpus+of+English%3A+The+Penn+Treebank%2E+Computational+Linguistics%2C+19%2E2%3A313%E2%80%93330%2C+June%2E) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/bank-1993-marcus-building-large-annotated-corpus-english/)
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