Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus LinguisticsVol. 28:3 (2023) ► pp.378–406
Differences in syntactic annotation affect retrieval
Verb-attached PPs in the history of English
Prepositional phrases (PPs) play an important part in English argument structure constructions, but pose considerable challenges for linguistic investigations of any kind. In addition to the fact that PP-attachment is generally notoriously difficult to model computationally, a particularly striking methodological challenge in investigating verb-dependent PPs across (synchronic and/or diachronic) corpora is that such cross-corpus studies may have to rely on material annotated with different tools. This study evaluates the impact that such differences in corpus annotation may have on retrieval of verb-attached PPs by means of data from Early and Late Modern English corpora. Our intrinsic (recall/precision) and extrinsic parser evaluation shows that annotation does play a role, but that the noise introduced is negligible as far as frequency developments are concerned.
Keywords: prepositions, verbal argument structure, Early and Late Modern English, bottom-up data retrieval, intrinsic and extrinsic parser evaluation
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.PP-retrieval across annotation schemes
- 2.1PPs as a challenge for parsing
- 2.2Differences between annotation schemes: Constituency vs. dependency parsing
- 3.Data and methods
- 3.1Set-up of the study: Datasets
- 3.2Retrieval of verb-attached PPs from the Penn-parsed vs. dependency parsed corpora
- 4.Results
- 4.1Intrinsic evaluation: Precision and recall
- 4.1.1Recall: Causes of under-generation
- 4.1.2Precision: Causes of over-generation
- 4.1.3General issues observed for both recall and precision
- 4.1.4Inter-annotator agreement in the gold standard
- 4.2Extrinsic evaluation: Verb-attached PPs in the history of English
- 4.1Intrinsic evaluation: Precision and recall
- 5.Conclusions
- Notes
-
References
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Cited by (1)
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Zehentner, Eva
2024.
Alternations (at) that time: NP versus PP time adjuncts in the history of English. Linguistics Vanguard 10:s1 ► pp. 19 ff. 
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