Study and application of explicit grammatical formalisms in the detection of inconsistency in treebanks

Abstract

This research project has as its main goal the study and application of Tree Adjoining Grammar (Joshi & Schabes, 1991) based formalisms to the problem of inconsistency detection in syntactically annotated corpora. The goal is to move from what I call a "naive approach" - where a poor or even no theoretical interpretation of the annotation is carried out - to an informed "theoretical approach" where an explicit grammatical formalism is applied in order to interpret and describe the data. Initial results of (more or less) naive algorithms evaluated in my ongoing research show that, besides other limitations, adjunction and conjoined structures cannot be adequately handled. With the help of explicit grammatical formalisms it is possible to overcome this inadequacy. The expected result of such a move is the increase in precision and coverage of the detection algorithm on the acceptable cost of a probable specialization of the method to particular kinds of annotation. (AU)