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# From TreeBank to PropBank

**Authors:** [Paul Kingsbury](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/paul-kingsbury/) and [Martha Palmer](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/martha-palmer/) · **Year:** 2002 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L02-1283](https://aclanthology.org/L02-1283/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only

[**533** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W12836875) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**254** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/kingsbury-2002-treebank-propbank/) 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/L02-1283/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L02-1283.pdf)
- [DOI 10.63317/3gh6v2hd4z55](https://doi.org/10.63317/3gh6v2hd4z55)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W12836875)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Paul Kingsbury](https://openalex.org/A5020721526) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1835-466X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2489901) · h 10 · 3769 citations · 20 works
2. [Martha Palmer](https://openalex.org/A5017464054) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9864-6974) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145755155) · h 57 · 20837 citations · 417 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 describes the first stage of PropBank, which adds predicate-argument labels to the verb instances of the Penn Treebank. Arguments are numbered Arg0 to Arg5 with a function tag for adjuncts (temporal, locative, manner and others), and the numbering is per verb sense, divided by syntax rather than by fine semantics. Frame files give each verb's syntactic realisations and argument labels with examples; roles are kept consistent across near-synonyms and Levin classes, and "metaframes" such as the exchange frame group buy, sell and purchase. By April 2002 frames existed for over 850 verbs, with 30 to 40 added each week, and copying frames from a verb to its Levin-class members needed correction for only one of 13 generated frames. Annotators handled about 50 sentences an hour, and inter-annotator agreement by tagged constituent ran between 80 and 100 percent.

## Ideas

- I1. Frame files for the school verbs: one file per verb with numbered roles (agent, theme, source, benefactive), kept in `en/src/dict.rs` or `world/src/dictionary.rs` and mapped to the world's roles. Start with the verbs in the first school lessons.
- I2. Copy the roleset of a verb to its class members, as the paper does with destroy, and count how many generated frames need correction. The paper's rate of one in 13 gives a reference point.
- I3. Metaframes for school stories: group buy, sell and pay into an exchange frame in `world/src/story.rs`, so that a story about shopping answers questions about any of the three verbs.
- I4. Map the functional tags (temporal, locative, manner, cause) onto the adjunct roles in `prag/src/roles.rs`, and check the mapping against the UD relations of adverbial modifiers on a sample.

## For Mova

The chapters are [13. Verbs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/13-verbs/) (verb frames) and [28. Voice and the passive](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/28-voice-and-passive/) (alternations that keep the same role). The code is `en/src/dict.rs`, `world/src/dictionary.rs` and `prag/src/roles.rs`. The measures are the frame coverage of the school verbs, the copy-correction rate, and the agreement of the adjunct mapping on a sample.

Topics: [Treebanks](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/treebanks/) · [Semantic role labeling](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/semantic-role-labeling/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.63317/3gh6v2hd4z55](https://doi.org/10.63317/3gh6v2hd4z55)

```
@inproceedings{kingsbury2002treebank,
  title = {{From TreeBank to PropBank}},
  author = {Kingsbury, Paul and Palmer, Martha},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02)},
  year = {2002},
  doi = {10.63317/3gh6v2hd4z55},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3gh6v2hd4z55}
}
```

- [← previous "Is the Pope Catholic?" Applying Chain-of-Thought Reasoning to Understanding Conversational Implicatures](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/kim-2023-pope-catholic-applying-chain-thought/)
- [next → A Rich Morphological Tagger for English: Exploring the Cross-Linguistic Tradeoff Between Morphology and Syntax](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/kirov-2017-rich-morphological-tagger-english-exploring/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

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