Adding Noun Phrase Structure to the Penn Treebank

The Penn Treebank does not annotate within base noun phrases (NPs), committing only to flat structures that ignore the complexity of English NPs. This means that tools trained on Treebank data cannot learn the correct internal structure of NPs. This paper details the process of adding gold-standard bracketing within each noun phrase in the Penn Treebank. We then examine the consistency and reliability of our annotations. Finally, we use this resource to determine NP structure using several statistical approaches, thus demonstrating the utility of the corpus. This adds detail to the Penn Treebank that is necessary for many NLP applications.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ACL
• Authors: David Vadas, James R. Curran
• Keywords: ACL 2007, Base Noun Phrases, Computational Linguistics, Noun Phrase, Penn Treebank