A Query Tool for Syntactically Frame Acquisition

A query tool for syntactically annotated corpora* Laura Kallmeyer UFRL, Universit4 Paris 7 2, place Jussieu 75251 Paris cedex 05 lmara, kallmeyer@linguist, jussieu, fr Abstract; This paper presents a query tool for syntacti- caUy ~.nnotated corpora. The query tool is de- veloped to search the Verbmobil treebanks an- notated at the University of Tfibingen. How- ever, in principle it also can be adapted to other corpora such as the Negra Corpus, the Penn Treebank or the French treebank devel- oped in Paris. The tool uses a query language that allows to search for tokens, syntactic cat- egories, grammatical functions and binary re- lations of (immediate) dominance and linear precedence between nodes. The overall idea is to extract in an initializing phase the rele- vant information from the corpus and store it in a relational database. An incoming query is then translated into a corresponding SQL query that is evaluated on the database. 1 Introduction 1.1 Syntactic annotation and linguistic research With the increasing availability of large amounts of electronic texts, linguists have ac- cess to more and more material for empiri- cally based linguistic research. Furthermore, electronic corpora are more and more richly annotated and thereby more and more de- tailed and structured information contained in the corpora becomes accessable. Currently many corpora are tagged with morphosyntac- tic categories (part-of-speech) and there are already several syntactically annotated cor- pora. Examples are the Penn Treebank (Mar- cus et al., 1994; Bies et al., 1995) annotated at the University of Pennsylvania, the Ne- gra corpus (Brauts et al., 1999) developed in Saarbriicken, the Verbmobil treebank~ (Hin- richs et al., 2000) annotated in Tiibingen *The work presented here was done as part of a project in SFB 441 "Linguistic Data Structures" at the University of Tiibingen. and the French treebank annotated in Paris (Abeill4 and C14ment, 1999). However, in order to have access to these rich linguistic annotations, adequate query tools are needed. In the following, an example of a linguisti- cally relevant construction is considered that illustrates how useful access to structural in- formation in a corpus might be. fiber Chomsky habe ich ein Buch about Chomsky have I a book (1) gelesen read 'I have read a book about Chomsky' Linguists are often concerned with con- structions that seem not very natural and where intuitions about grammaticality fail. An example is (1) where we have an accusative object (ein Buch) which is positioned between the two verbal elements and whose modifier (the prepositional phrase iiber Chomsky) is topicailzed. Some people claim (1) to be ungrammatical whereas other people are inclined to accept it. In these cases it is very useful to search in an adequate corpus for more natural data show- ing the same construction (see also (Meurers, 1999) for other ex~.mples of the use of corpora for linguistic research). In order to find structures like (1) in a Ger- man corpus, one needs to search for (a) a prepositional phrase modifying the ac- cusative object and preceding the finite verb …

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