Detection of Errors and Correction
in Corpus Annotation

Ad Hoc Treebank Structures

Markus Dickinson

Proceedings of ACL'08.

We outline the problem of ad hoc rules in treebanks, rules used for specific constructions in one data set and unlikely to be used again. These include ungeneralizable rules, erroneous rules, rules for ungrammatical text, and rules which are not consistent with the rest of the annotation scheme. Based on a simple notion of rule equivalence and on the idea of finding rules unlike any others, we develop two methods for detecting ad hoc rules in flat treebanks and show they are successful in detecting such rules. This is done by examining evidence across the grammar and without making any reference to context.

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Bibtex entry: 

@InProceedings{dickinson:08,
  author =       {Markus Dickinson},
  title =        {Ad Hoc Treebank Structures},
  booktitle =    {The 46th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational 
                  Linguistics (ACL) with the Human Language Technology
                  Conference (HLT) (ACL-08)},
  pages=         {362--370},
  address =      {Columbus, OH},
  url =          {\url{http://jones.ling.indiana.edu/~mdickinson/papers/dickinson08.html}},
  year =         {2008}
}