PropBank

Martha PalmerUniversity of Colorado

Unified Linguistic Annotation:Merging PropBank, NomBank, TimeBank, Penn Discourse

Treebank, Coreference, and OpinionsYour all invited to the Project Meeting at Colorado March

18-20• Motivation

– Broadening the semantic annotation of linguistic corpora– Providing the community with a more robust resource

• Requirements– Merging and integrating existing linguistic annotation schemes into one unified and consistent layer.– Production of a stable and language-independent methodology for unified annotation– Incorporation of additional annotation schemes, new genres, and additional languages

• Issues– Merging overlapping annotations– Resolving conflicting annotations

Annotation Efforts Involved• Treebank

– Marcus, Santorini, and Marcinkiewicz (1993)• PropBank

– Palmer, Gildea, and Kingsbury (2005)• NomBank

– Meyers, Reeves, Macleod, Szekely, Zielinska, Young, and Grishman (2004)

• TimeBank– Pustejovsky, Littman, Knippen, and Sauri (2005)

• MATE/GNOME Anaphoric Reference– Poesio (2004a, 2004b)

• Penn Discourse TreeBank– Miltsakaki, Prasad, Joshi, and Webber (2004)

• Opinion Corpus– Wiebe, Wilson, and Cardie (2005)

An example of utility – Who did what do whom?

(S(NP-SBJ 0:1-ARG!

(NNS Stores(VP

(VBP are(VP (VBG expanding 2:0-rel expand.01))))

“Stores are expanding.” Stores are the “thing grown” and not the “causer.”

ID : expand.01 - Name : (cause to) growArg0 : causer of growth, agentArg1 : thing grownArg2 : amount increased by, EXT or MNRArg3 : start pointArg4 : end point

Utility of Propbank/Nombank

• Aid to Recovering Implicit Information– Empty Arg0/Causer of expansion– Look for potential cause in previous sentence• “economic development”

• A foundation for temporal and causal relation annotations

• Also modality annotations, committed belief annotations, etc.