Work

Differences in syntactic annotation affect retrieval

Year: 2023
Type: article
Abstract: Prepositional phrases (PPs) play an important part in English argument structure constructions, but pose considerable challenges for linguistic investigations of any kind. In addition to the fact that PP-attachment is generally notoriously difficult to model computationally, a particularly striking methodological challenge in investigating verb-dependent PPs across (synchronic and/or diachronic) corpora is that such cross-corpus studies may have to rely on material annotated with different tools. This study evaluates the impact that such differences in corpus annotation may have on retrieval of verb-attached PPs by means of data from Early and Late Modern English corpora. Our intrinsic (recall/precision) and extrinsic parser evaluation shows that annotation does play a role, but that the noise introduced is negligible as far as frequency developments are concerned.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4376640492
FWCI: 0.349
Cites: 29
Cited by: 4
Related to: 10