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# Construction of an English Dependency Corpus incorporating Compound Function Words

**Authors:** [Akihiko Kato](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/akihiko-kato/), [Hiroyuki Shindo](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/hiroyuki-shindo/), [Yuji Matsumoto](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/yuji-matsumoto/) · **Year:** 2016 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L16-1263](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1263/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) (LREC proceedings) — summary only

[**7** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2574523836) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**5** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/gram-2016-kato-construction-english-dependency-corpus-incorporating/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L16-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1263/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1263.pdf)
- [DOI 10.63317/39nvzyfiagt4](https://doi.org/10.63317/39nvzyfiagt4)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2574523836)

**Authors (3)**

1. [Akihiko Kato](https://openalex.org/A5020392181) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8238-5781) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2065026591) · h 46 · 7203 citations · 324 works
2. [Hiroyuki Shindo](https://openalex.org/A5063398043) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1081-9194) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/73467110) · h 21 · 2241 citations · 105 works
3. [Yuji Matsumoto](https://openalex.org/A5072032804) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4946-9574) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1681502) · h 46 · 12113 citations · 591 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

Penn Treebank annotation does not mark multiword expressions, and merging the nodes of a multiword unit in a word-based dependency tree can give a node with two heads or a cycle. The authors avoid this by first grouping the words of a compound function word (such as "because of", "according to", "even though") into one subtree of the phrase structure, and then converting to Stanford dependencies with the MWE as a single node. They apply this to OntoNotes (Wall Street Journal part), using the Shigeto et al. MWE dictionary, and classify each case as Simple (5,129 instances, 427 MWE types), Complex-Normal (1,742 instances, 117 types) or Complex-Abnormal (57 instances, 27 types), where the last needs manual decisions. A first-order MST parser with gold tags, trained on sections 02-21 and tested on section 23, gives UAS 89.99 on the original dependencies and 90.01 on the MWE-aware ones, with 87.77 and 87.84 on the 266 test sentences that contain MWEs. Most errors come from MWE tags unseen in training, and 286 of 289 test MWEs occur in training.

## Ideas

- I1. `en/seeds/lexicon` and `en/src/ptag.rs`: a dictionary of compound function words, used as a tagger feature so that the whole unit gets one tag; measure UPOS and LAS on EWT test restricted to sentences with such words, twice to check determinism.
- I2. `en/src/convert.rs`: when a PTB-style tree is converted, group a dictionary MWE as one subtree before head assignment, which avoids the multiple-head case; measure the count of multiple-head and cycle repairs on PTB sections (test only) before and after.
- I3. `en/src/parse.rs`: use the MWE identity (word forms and tags of its parts) as features for the head of the unit, which the paper suggests for its unseen-MWE errors; measure head-attachment accuracy on the MWE-containing sentences of EWT test.
- I4. `tools/treeagree`: a gate that rejects a `mwe` group with arcs leaving from inner words, to keep the flat head-initial structure of UD; measure violations per 1k silver trees with `treeagree check`.

## For Mova

Touches `languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register`, `22-phrases` and `23-complementation`, and the `en` crate (`ptag.rs`, `convert.rs`, `parse.rs`), `en/seeds/lexicon` and `tools/treeagree`. PTB material is research-only: test only. Measure first how many EWT test sentences contain a dictionary compound function word and what the head-attachment accuracy is on them.

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.63317/39nvzyfiagt4](https://doi.org/10.63317/39nvzyfiagt4)

```
@inproceedings{kato2016construction,
  title = {{Construction of an English Dependency Corpus incorporating Compound Function Words}},
  author = {Kato, Akihiko and Shindo, Hiroyuki and Matsumoto, Yuji},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.63317/39nvzyfiagt4},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/39nvzyfiagt4}
}
```

- [← previous Recognizing Expressions of Commonsense Psychology in English Text](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/gordon-2003-recognizing-expressions-commonsense-psychology-english/)
- [next → NoEl: An Annotated Corpus for Noun Ellipsis in English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/gram-2020-khullar-noel-annotated-corpus-noun-ellipsis/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

## References

12 references, 4 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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