CGELBank: CGEL as a Framework for English Syntax Annotation

TL;DR

This paper presents CGELBank, a new English syntax treebank based on the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, offering a balanced formalism for linguistic analysis and corpus annotation.

Contribution

It introduces the CGEL formalism to treebanking, compares it with existing frameworks, and discusses its advantages for linguistic annotation and future automation.

Findings

CGEL provides a good tradeoff between analysis detail and usability.

Quantitative and qualitative comparisons with UD and PTB highlight CGEL's strengths.

The project sets the stage for automatic conversion and expanded corpus annotation.

Abstract

We introduce the syntactic formalism of the \textit{Cambridge Grammar of the English Language} (CGEL) to the world of treebanking through the CGELBank project. We discuss some issues in linguistic analysis that arose in adapting the formalism to corpus annotation, followed by quantitative and qualitative comparisons with parallel UD and PTB treebanks. We argue that CGEL provides a good tradeoff between comprehensiveness of analysis and usability for annotation, which motivates expanding the treebank with automatic conversion in the future.