For the 11th straight year, the Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning has been accompanied by a shared task whose purpose is to promote natural language processing applications and evaluate them in a standard setting. In 2009, the shared task was dedicated to the joint parsing of syntactic and semantic dependencies in multiple languages. This shared task combines the shared tasks of the previous five years under a unique dependency-based formalism similar to the 2008 task. In this paper, we define the shared task, describe how the data sets were created and show their quantitative properties, report the results and summarize the approaches of the participating systems.

The paper presents the initial release of the Slovene Dependency Treebank, currently containing 2000 sentences or 30.000 words. Our approach to annotation is based on the Prague Dependency Treebank, which serves as an excellent model due to the similarity of the languages, the existence of a detailed annotation guide and an annotation editor. The initial treebank contains a portion of the MULTEXT-East parallel word-level annotated corpus, namely the first part of the Slovene translation of Orwell’s “1984”. This corpus was first parsed automatically, to arrive at the initial analytic level dependency trees. These were then hand corrected using the tree editor TrEd; simultaneously, the Czech annotation manual was modified for Slovene. The current version is available in XML/TEI, as well as derived formats, and has been used in a comparative evaluation using the MALT parser, and as one of the languages present in the CoNLL-X shared task on dependency parsing. The paper also discusses further work, in the first instance the composition of the corpus to be annotated next. 1.

This paper describes a tool for aligning and searching parallel treebanks. Such treebanks are a new type of parallel corpora that come with syntactic annotation on both languages plus sub-sentential alignment. Our tool allows the visualization of tree pairs and the comfortable annotation of word and phrase alignments. It also allows monolingual and bilingual searches including the specification of alignment constraints. We show that the TIGER-Search query language can easily be combined with such alignment constraints to obtain a powerful cross-lingual query language. 1

In this paper we present several use cases for the Stockholm TreeAligner, a software tool originally designed for annotating the alignments in a parallel treebank. The tool has been extended and improved to the point that it can now also serve as a general tool for browsing and searching monolingual and parallel treebanks. Among the use cases presented are: building a parallel treebank, browsing mono- and bilingual treebanks, consistency checking using the search function, comparing PP-attachment in different languages, and viewing different versions of the same treebank. A demonstration of the software will be held during the workshop. 1

Abstract. Given much recent discussion and the shift in focus of the field, it is becoming apparent that the incorporation of syntax is the way forward for the current state-of-the-art in machine translation (MT). Parallel treebanks are a relatively recent innovation and appear to be ideal candidates for MT training material. However, until recently there has been no other means to build them than by hand. In this paper, we describe how we make use of new tools to automatically build a large parallel treebank and extract a set of linguistically motivated phrase pairs from it. We show that adding these phrase pairs to the translation model of a baseline phrase-based statistical MT (PBSMT) system leads to significant improvements in translation quality. We describe further experiments on incorporating parallel treebank information into PBSMT, such as word alignments. We investigate the conditions under which the incorporation of parallel treebank data performs optimally. Finally, we discuss the potential of parallel treebanks in other paradigms of MT. 1

This paper presents the English valency lexicon EngValLex, built within the Functional Generative Description framework. The form of the lexicon, as well as the process of its semi-automatic creation is described. The lexicon describes valency for verbs and also includes links to other lexical sources, namely PropBank. Basic statistics about the lexicon are given. The lexicon will be later used for annotation of the Wall Street Journal section of the Penn Treebank in Praguian formalisms.

Abstract not found

Computing translation units and quantifying parallelism in parallel dependency treebanks

The paper presents the work-in-progress of building the Croatian Dependency Treebank. Its design principles, procedures and the pilot corpus used within are described. Perspectives for further development of the Croatian Dependency Treebank are presented at the end. 1.

Abstract not found