A Parallel Proposition Bank II for Chinese and English

Proceedings of the Workshop on Frontiers in Corpus Annotation II: Pie in the Sky, pages 61–67, Ann Arbor, June 2005. c⃝2005 Association for Computational Linguistics A Parallel Proposition Bank II for Chinese and English∗ Martha Palmer, Nianwen Xue, Olga Babko-Malaya, Jinying Chen, Benjamin Snyder Department of Computer and Information Science University of Pennsylvania {mpalmer/xueniwen/malayao/Jinying/bsnyder3}@linc.cis.upenn.edu Abstract The Proposition Bank (PropBank) project is aimed at creating a corpus of text an- notated with information about seman- tic propositions. The second phase of the project, PropBank II adds additional levels of semantic annotation which in- clude eventuality variables, co-reference, coarse-grained sense tags, and discourse connectives. This paper presents the re- sults of the parallel PropBank II project, which adds these richer layers of semantic annotation to the first 100K of the Chinese Treebank and its English translation. Our preliminary analysis supports the hypoth- esis that this additional annotation recon- ciles many of the surface differences be- tween the two languages. 1 Introduction There is a pressing need for a consensus on a task- oriented level of semantic representation that can en- able the development of powerful new semantic ana- lyzers in the same way that the Penn Treebank (Mar- cus et al., 1993) enabled the development of sta- tistical syntactic parsers (Collins, 1999; Charniak, 2001). We believe that shallow semantics expressed as a dependency structure, i.e., predicate-argument structure, for verbs, participial modifiers, and nom- inalizations provides a feasible level of annotation that would be of great benefit. This annotation, cou- pled with word senses, minimal co-reference links, ∗This work is funded by the NSF via Grant EIA02-05448 . event identifiers, and discourse and temporal rela- tions, could provide the foundation for a major ad- vance in our ability to automatically extract salient relationships from text. This will in turn facilitate breakthroughs in message understanding, machine translation, fact retrieval, and information retrieval. The Proposition Bank project is a major step towards providing this type of annotation. It takes a prac- tical approach to semantic representation, adding a layer of predicate argument information, or seman- tic roles, to the syntactic structures of the Penn Tree- bank (Palmer et al., 2005). The Frame Files that provide guidance to the annotators constitute a rich English lexicon with explicit ties between syntac- tic realizations and coarse-grained senses, Frame- sets. PropBank Framesets are distinguished primar- ily by syntactic criteria such as differences in sub- categorization frames, and can be seen as the top- level of an hierarchy of sense distinctions. Group- ings of fine-grained WordNet senses, such as those developed for Senseval2 (Palmer et al., to appear) provide an intermediate level, where groups are dis- tinguished by either syntactic or semantic criteria. WordNet senses constitute the bottom level. The PropBank Frameset distinctions, which can be made consistently by humans and systems (over 90% ac- curacy for both), are surprisingly compatible with the groupings; 95% of the groups map directly onto a single PropBank frameset sense (Palmer et al., 2004). The semantic annotation provided by PropBank is only a first …

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