Treebanks: Linking Linguistic Theory to Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Treebanks are language resources that provide annotations at various levels of linguistic structure starting from the word level. They typically provide syntactic constituent or dependency structures for sentences, but increasingly extend to annotation beyond syntactic structure, including semantic, pragmatic and rhetorical annotation, or go beyond a single language, as in parallel treebanks.

Experience in building treebanks has shown that there is a close relation between formal linguistic theory and the design and practice of annotation. With increasing complexity of annotations, the design of annotation schemes becomes more and more theory-dependent. At the same time, linguistically motivated treebank annotations have become crucially important for the development of data-driven approaches to natural language processing and for linguistic research in general.

Treebanks therefore constitute an important link between linguistic theory and computational linguistics.

The International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories provides a forum for researchers working on treebanks from both perspectives. The present volume presents the contents of the 10th edition of this workshop series, held in 2012 at the University of Heidelberg.