Bank of English and Beyond

The 200 million word corpus of the Bank of English was annotated morphologically and syntactically using the English Constraint Grammar analyser, a rulebased shallow parser developed at the Research Unit for Computational Linguistics, University of Helsinki. We discuss the annotation system and methods used in the corpus work, as well as the theoretical assumptions of the Constraint Grammar syntax. Based on our experience in large-scale corpus work, we argue for a deeper and more explicit, dependency-based syntactic representation. We present a new practical parsing system, the Functional Dependency Grammar parser, developed from the Constraint Grammar system, and discuss its suitability for treebank annotation.