PhD thesis - School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh

Chapter 5. Parsing English Inclusions 132
5.3.5.1 Gold Standard Phrase Categories
Table 5.5 lists the different types of phrase categories surrounding the 109 multi-word
English inclusions in the error analysis sample and their frequency. 6 The last column
lists a typical example for each category. The figures illustrate that the majority of
multi-word English inclusions are contained in a proper noun (PN) phrase, including
names of companies, political parties, organisations, films, books, newspapers, etc.
The components of PN phrases tend to be marked with the grammatical function PNC,
proper noun component (Brants et al., 2002). A less frequent phrasal category of En-
glish inclusions is chunk (CH) which tends to be used for slogans, quotes or expressions
like Made in Germany. The components of CH phrases are annotated with a grammat-
ical function of type UC (unit component). Even in this small sample, phrase category
annotations of English inclusions as either PN or CH, and not the other, can be mislead-
ing. For example, the organisation Friends of the Earth is annotated as PN, whereas
another organisation International Union for the Conservation of Nature is marked as
CH in the gold standard. The latter is believed to be an inconsistency in the annotation
and should have been marked as PN as well.
The phrase category of an English inclusion with the syntactic function of a noun
phrase which is neither a PN nor a CH is annotated as NP (noun phrase). One exam-
ple is Peace Enforcement which is not translated into German and used rather like a
buzzword in a sentence on UN missions. In this case, the POS tag of its individual
tokens is NN (noun). The fact that this expression is not German is therefore lost in
the gold standard annotation. Another example of an English inclusion NP in the gold
standard is Framingham Heart Study which could arguably be of phrase category PN.
Furthermore, the sample contains an example of phrase category CH, Shopping Mall,
an English noun phrase. The least frequent type of phrase category used for English
inclusions is CNP. In this sample, this category marks a company names made up of a
conjunction, for example Botts and Company. The POS tags of the coordinated sisters
are NE (named entity) and the English coordinated conjunction and is tagged as KON.
Finally, there are also two cases, where the English inclusion itself is not contained in
a phrase category. One of them is Chief Executives which is clearly an NP. These are
believed to be annotation errors.
6 All phrase category (node) labels and grammatical function (edge) labels occurring in the TIGER
treebank annotation are listed and defined in Appendix C.