Welcome to the webpage of the Treebanks course for the summer semester of 2024!
Grades
The grades for this module are based on a series of smallish projects (Portfolio), assigned and completed throughout the course of the semester.
Course description
A successful syntactic analysis of a language will provide structural descriptions for each of its sentences. Treebanks implicitly represent a syntactic theory, as they contain structural descriptions for each sentence in a corpus. Typically, a good treebank is the result of a massive investment in time and money. However, a treebank will typically not assign the structures that any given linguist believes are right. How can we make productive use of wrong resources?! This course looks at some popular treebanks (in particular the Penn Treebank and Universal Dependencies treebanks) and introduces their annotation schemes, and tools for interacting with them. In addition, we discuss attempts to use existing treebanks to create treebanks for different linguistic theories.