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# Annotating Coordination in the Penn Treebank

**Authors:** Wolfgang Maier, [Sandra Kübler](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/sandra-kubler/), [Erhard Hinrichs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/erhard-hinrichs/), Julia Krivanek · **Year:** 2012 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Sixth Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW VI) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/W12-3624](https://aclanthology.org/W12-3624/) (ACL Anthology W12-3624) **License of the paper:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, pre-2016) — [creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

[**8** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/maier-2012-annotating-coordination-penn-treebank/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Sixth Linguistic Annotation Workshop](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/W12-36/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W12-3624/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W12-3624.pdf)

**Authors (4)**

1. Wolfgang Maier
2. Sandra Kübler
3. Erhard Hinrichs
4. Julia Krivanek

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

## Summary

Coordination matters for many NLP tasks, but large treebanks such as the Penn Treebank do not mark it explicitly: coordinated phrases carry ordinary labels and a comma between conjuncts has the same tag as any other comma, so conjunction-less coordination is nearly invisible. The authors add an annotation layer to roughly half of the PTB in which every sentence-internal punctuation mark is labelled as coordinating or not. Decisions are made from the tree, essentially by checking whether the neighbours under the lowest common node are like constituents (with special handling for unlike coordination and prenominal coordination). Only about 14% of commas but most semicolons turn out to be coordinating. With the new layer far more coordinate structures, especially those with three or more conjuncts, can be found than by searching for the CC tag alone. The authors see this as a basis for learning coordination boundaries and improving parsing.

## How Mova uses it

- [Coordination: the head is the first conjunct, cc is on the next one](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/en/seeds/errors/coordination-structure/) — cited as background in the note on UD v2 coordination (first conjunct is the head, `cc` attaches to the following conjunct), which carries the rules `en.errors.conj-rightward` and `en.errors.cc-before-conjunct`. The point taken from the paper: in PTB a coordinating comma is indistinguishable from an ordinary one, and only about 14% of commas are coordinating, so commas cannot be treated as conjunction markers.
- No rule is derived from it directly.

## Effectiveness in Mova

Background reading for one seed note. Not measured separately.

---

👨‍🔬💥

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{maier2012annotating,
  title = {{Annotating Coordination in the Penn Treebank}},
  author = {Maier, Wolfgang and Kübler, Sandra and Hinrichs, Erhard and Krivanek, Julia},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth Linguistic Annotation Workshop},
  year = {2012},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W12-3624/}
}
```

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## References

12 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, Mark Ferguson, Karen Katz, and Robert Mac-Intyre, 1995. Bracketing Guidelines for Treebank II Style Penn Treebank Project. University of Pennsylvania. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ann+Bies%2C+Mark+Ferguson%2C+Karen+Katz%2C+and+Robert+Mac%2DIntyre%2C+1995%2E+Bracketing+Guidelines+for+Treebank+II+Style+Penn+Treebank+Project%2E+University+of+Pennsylvania%2E)
2. Sabine Brants, Stefanie Dipper, Silvia Hansen, Wolfgang Lezius, and George Smith. 2002. The TIGER treebank. In Erhard Hinrichs and Kiril Simov, editors, Proceedings of the First Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT 2002), pages 24–41, Sozopol, Bulgaria. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Sabine+Brants%2C+Stefanie+Dipper%2C+Silvia+Hansen%2C+Wolfgang+Lezius%2C+and+George+Smith%2E+2002%2E+The+TIGER+treebank%2E+In+Erhard+Hinrichs+and+Kiril+Simov%2C+editors%2C+Proceedings+of+the+First+Workshop+on+Treebanks+)
3. Katharina Hartmann. 2000. Right Node Raising and Gapping. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Katharina+Hartmann%2E+2000%2E+Right+Node+Raising+and+Gapping%2E+John+Benjamins%2C+Amsterdam%2C+The+Netherlands%2E)
4. Erhard W. Hinrichs, Julia Bartels, Yasuhiro Kawata, Valia Kordoni, and Heike Telljohann. 2000. The Verbmobil treebanks. In Proceedings of KONVENS 2000, 5. Konferenz zur Verarbeitung natürlicher Sprache, pages 107–112, Ilmenau, Germany. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Erhard+W%2E+Hinrichs%2C+Julia+Bartels%2C+Yasuhiro+Kawata%2C+Valia+Kordoni%2C+and+Heike+Telljohann%2E+2000%2E+The+Verbmobil+treebanks%2E+In+Proceedings+of+KONVENS+2000%2C+5%2E+Konferenz+zur+Verarbeitung+natu%CC%88rlicher+Sprac)
5. Deirdre Hogan. 2007. Coordinate noun phrase disambiguation in a generative parsing model. In Proceedings of the 45th Annual Meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, pages 680–687, Prague, Czech Republic. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Deirdre+Hogan%2E+2007%2E+Coordinate+noun+phrase+disambiguation+in+a+generative+parsing+model%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+45th+Annual+Meeting+of+the+Association+of+Computational+Linguistics%2C+pages+680%E2%80%93687%2C+Prag)
6. Sandra Kübler, Erhard W. Hinrichs, Wolfgang Maier, and Eva Klett. 2009. Parsing coordinations. In Proceedings of the 12th Conference of the European Chapter of the ACL (EACL), pages 406–414, Athens, Greece. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Sandra+Ku%CC%88bler%2C+Erhard+W%2E+Hinrichs%2C+Wolfgang+Maier%2C+and+Eva+Klett%2E+2009%2E+Parsing+coordinations%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+12th+Conference+of+the+European+Chapter+of+the+ACL+%28EACL%29%2C+pages+406%E2%80%93414%2C+Athens%2C+)
7. Mitchell P. Marcus, Beatrice Santorini, and Mary Ann Marcinkiewicz. 1993. Building a large annotated corpus of English: The Penn Treebank. Computational Linguistics, 19(2):313–330. Special Issue on Using Large Corpora: II. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Mitchell+P%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%282%29%3A313%E2%80%93330%2E+Special+Issue+on+Us) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/bank-1993-marcus-building-large-annotated-corpus-english/)
8. Preslav Nakov and Marti Hearst. 2005. Using the web as an implicit training set: Application to structural ambiguity resolution. In Proceedings of Human Language Technology Conference and Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 835– 842, Vancouver, Canada. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Preslav+Nakov+and+Marti+Hearst%2E+2005%2E+Using+the+web+as+an+implicit+training+set%3A+Application+to+structural+ambiguity+resolution%2E+In+Proceedings+of+Human+Language+Technology+Conference+and+Conference+o)
9. Masashi Shimbo and Kazuo Hara. 2007. A discriminative learning model for coordinate conjunctions. In Proceedings of the 2007 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning (EMNLP-CoNLL), pages 610–619, Prague, Czech Republic. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Masashi+Shimbo+and+Kazuo+Hara%2E+2007%2E+A+discriminative+learning+model+for+coordinate+conjunctions%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+2007+Joint+Conference+on+Empirical+Methods+in+Natural+Language+Processing+and+Co)
10. Wojciech Skut, Thorsten Brants, Brigitte Krenn, and Hans Uszkoreit. 1998. A linguistically interpreted corpus of German newspaper texts. In ESSLLI Workshop on Recent Advances in Corpus Annotation, Saarbrücken, Germany. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Wojciech+Skut%2C+Thorsten+Brants%2C+Brigitte+Krenn%2C+and+Hans+Uszkoreit%2E+1998%2E+A+linguistically+interpreted+corpus+of+German+newspaper+texts%2E+In+ESSLLI+Workshop+on+Recent+Advances+in+Corpus+Annotation%2C+Saa)
11. Heike Telljohann, Erhard Hinrichs, and Sandra Kübler. 2004. The TüBa-D/Z treebank: Annotating German with a context-free backbone. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pages 2229–2235, Lisbon, Portugal. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Heike+Telljohann%2C+Erhard+Hinrichs%2C+and+Sandra+Ku%CC%88bler%2E+2004%2E+The+Tu%CC%88Ba%2DD%2FZ+treebank%3A+Annotating+German+with+a+context%2Dfree+backbone%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+Fourth+International+Conference+on+Language+R)
12. Christine Thielen and Anne Schiller. 1994. Ein kleines und erweitertes Tagset fürs Deutsche. In Helmut Feldweg and Erhard Hinrichs, editors, Lexikon & Text, pages 215–226. Niemeyer, Tübingen. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Christine+Thielen+and+Anne+Schiller%2E+1994%2E+Ein+kleines+und+erweitertes+Tagset+fu%CC%88rs+Deutsche%2E+In+Helmut+Feldweg+and+Erhard+Hinrichs%2C+editors%2C+Lexikon+%26+Text%2C+pages+215%E2%80%93226%2E+Niemeyer%2C+Tu%CC%88bingen%2E)