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Current Directions in English and Arabic PropBank

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Handbook of Linguistic Annotation

Abstract

This chapter gives an overview of the infrastructure, annotation practices, and current challenges of both the English and Arabic PropBank corpora. More details about the Hindi and Urdu PropBanks can be found in chapter “The Hindi/Urdu Treebank Project” (this volume). The focus of current efforts is on expanding the types of relations covered by PropBank. Previously, the annotation effort focused on event relations expressed solely by verbs. (A separate but related effort, NomBank, focused on nouns [26].) However, a complete representation of event relations within and across sentences requires expanding that focus to all syntactic realizations of event and state semantics, including expressions in the form of nouns, adjectives and multi-word expressions. This effort reflects a general desire to move to a deeper level of semantic understanding, abstracting away from language-particular syntactic facts. The chapter closes with a discussion of future directions for PropBank.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/propbank/.

  2. 2.

    The term “Roleset” is sometimes used interchangeably with the term “Frameset”.

  3. 3.

    Note that the actual Frame Files are transliterated following a modified version of the Buckwalter transliteration system http://www.qamus.org/transliteration.htm in line with Arabic TreeBank.

  4. 4.

    This lexical resource is quite similar in nature to FrameNet [10] and VerbNet [22] in the semantic specificity of role labels.

  5. 5.

    ARZ is the ISO language code for Egyptian Arabic.

  6. 6.

    Notably, the lemmas included in this example may have been candidates for unification since they are clearly morphologically and semantically related. See Sect. 3.3 for a discussion relating to this issue.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Colorado, Boulder, CO, USA

    Kathryn Conger, Aous Mansouri, Yahya Aseri, Julia Bonn, Timothy O’Gorman & Martha Palmer

  2. U.S. Army Research Laboratory, Adelphi, MD, USA

    Claire Bonial

  3. IHMC, Ocala, FL, USA

    Jena D. Hwang

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Correspondence to Martha Palmer .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, USA

    Nancy Ide

  2. Department of Computer Science, Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, USA

    James Pustejovsky

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Bonial, C. et al. (2017). Current Directions in English and Arabic PropBank. In: Ide, N., Pustejovsky, J. (eds) Handbook of Linguistic Annotation. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-0881-2_27

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-0881-2_27

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