| the lingo redwoods treebank: motivation and preliminary applications the lingo redwoods initiative is a seed activity in the design and development of a new type of treebank. while several medium to large-scale treebanks exist for english (and for other major languages), pre-existing publicly available resources exhibit the following limitations: (i) annotation is mono-stratal, either encoding topological (phrase structure) or tectogrammatical (dependency) information, (ii) the depth of linguistic information recorded is comparatively shallow, (iii) the design and format of linguistic representation in the tree-bank hard-wires a small, predefined range of ways in which information can be extracted from the treebank, and (iv) representations in existing treebanks are static and over the (often year or decade-long) evolution of a large-scale treebank tend to fall behind the development of the field. lingo redwoods aims at the development of a novel treebanking methodology, rich in nature and dynamic both in the ways linguistic data can be retrieved from the treebank in varying granularity and in the constant evolution and regular updating of the treebank itself. since october 2001, the project is working to build the foundations for this new type of treebank, to develop a basic set of tools for treebank construction and maintenance, and to construct an initial set of 10,000 annotated trees to be distributed together with the tools under an open-source license. we develop the hpsg lingo redwoods treebank. the redwoods treebank has been created to provide annotated training material to permit statistical models for ambiguity resolution to be combined with the precise interpretations produced by the erg. dynamic, discriminant-based treebanking is pioneered in the redwoods treebank of english. |