Martha Palmer

An enrichment of verb entries in WordNet that includes more specific syntactic information and verb class membership. It draws heavily on Levin Classes and the English Tree-Adjoining Grammar; (see also SIGLEX, and EAGLES, now ISLE)

(VerbNet also forms the basis of Parameterized Action Representations which were used for natural language interaction with virtual humans, work that was done at Penn.)

We are using a similar approach to provide a companion lexicon for the Penn TreeBank. We created a Proposition Bank by tagging predicate-argument structures in the TreeBank with sense tags and argument labels based on lexicon entries with predicate-argument structure information. The choices we are making with respect to predicate-argument structure tagging also influenced the sense-tagging decisions in the preparation of training data for SENSEVAL2.

Current versions of these projects and applications that make use of them can be found on the Project pages of CLEAR, the Computational Language and EducAtion Center .

This project began with the annotation of 100K words of Xinhua newswire with syntactic structure, and now encompasses a 2M word Chinese Treebank (primarily Xinhua newsire, the Sinorama news magazine, Broadcast News, Talk shows and Web Text), as well as PropBank annotation, pronoun coreference annotation, word sense tags, and discourse connective annotation for the same data. A parallel 350K English corpus has also being annotated. Funding has been primarily from the ACE program, Darpa TIDES, GALE and BOLT and NSF. This project has moved to Brandeis, under the direction of Nianwen Xue.