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Empty categories in a Hindi treebank

  • Archna Bhatia
  • , Rajesh Bhatt
  • , Bhuvana Narasimhan
  • , Martha Palmer
  • , Owen Rambow
  • , Dipti Misra Sharma
  • , Michael Tepper
  • , Ashwini Vaidya
  • , Fei Xia
  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
  • University of Massachusetts
  • University of Colorado Boulder
  • International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad
  • University of Washington

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

5 Scopus citations

Abstract

We are in the process of creating a multi-representational and multi-layered treebank for Hindi/Urdu (Palmer et al., 2009), which has three main layers: dependency structure, predicate-argument structure (PropBank), and phrase structure. This paper discusses an important issue in treebank design which is often neglected: the use of empty categories (ECs). All three levels of representation make use of ECs. We make a high-level distinction between two types of ECs, trace and silent, on the basis of whether they are postulated to mark displacement or not. Each type is further refined into several subtypes based on the underlying linguistic phenomena which the ECs are introduced to handle. This paper discusses the stages at which we add ECs to the Hindi/Urdu treebank and why. We investigate methodically the different types of ECs and their role in our syntactic and semantic representations. We also examine our decisions whether or not to coindex each type of ECs with other elements in the representation.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010
EditorsDaniel Tapias, Irene Russo, Olivier Hamon, Stelios Piperidis, Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Bente Maegaard, Jan Odijk, Mike Rosner
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages1863-1870
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)2951740867, 9782951740860
StatePublished - 2010
Event7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010 - Valletta, Malta
Duration: May 17 2010May 23 2010

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010

Conference

Conference7th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2010
Country/TerritoryMalta
CityValletta
Period05/17/1005/23/10

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