Linguistic Issues in Language Technology – LiLT

Treebanks are language resources that provide annotations at various levels of linguistic structure starting from the word level. They typically provide syntactic constituent or dependency structures for sentences, but increasingly extend to annotation beyond syntactic structure, including semantic, pragmatic and rhetorical annotation, or go beyond a single language, as in parallel treebanks. Experience in building treebanks has shown that there is a close relation between formal linguistic theory and the design and practice of annotation. With increasing complexity of annotations, the design of annotation schemes becomes more and more theory-dependent. At the same time, linguistically motivated treebank annotations have become crucially important for the development of data-driven approaches to natural language processing and for linguistic research in general. Treebanks therefore constitute an important link between linguistic theory and computational linguistics. The International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories provides a forum for researchers working on treebanks from both perspectives. The present volume presents the contents of the 10th edition of this workshop series, held in 2012 at the University of Heidelberg. 1 LiLT Volume 7, Issue 1, January 2012. Treebanks: Linking Linguistic Theory to Computational Linguistics. Copyright c © 2012, CSLI Publications. 2 / LiLT volume 7, issue 1 January 2012 1 Ten Years of "Treebanks and Linguistic Theories" “Treebanks and Linguistic Theories” was initiated as an international workshop series in 2002 in Sozopol, on the initiative of Erhard Hinrichs and Kiril Simov. Over the last ten years this workshop has successfully established itself as a forum for researchers in the field of Computational Linguistics who are experts in the design, creation and exploitation of annotated corpora and their role in linking linguistic theory and computational linguistics. At the time this workshop was initiated, the relevance of treebanks for advancing the state of the art in Natural Language Processing was clearly acknowledged, by the impact of the first projects creating annotated corpora for English, such as the Penn Treebank, the Susanne and the Lancaster corpora, but also pioneering projects that started to build treebanks for other languages, such as German, Czech, Bulgarian, Italian or Spanish. With the rise of more and more treebanking projects targeting novel languages and layers of annotation, there was also an increasing awareness of the relevance and impact of linguistic theory for the design of treebank annotation schemes. With more and more languages being addressed, novel linguistic phenomena needed to be accommodated, and insights from linguistic theory proved crucial for designing wellmotivated, transparent, informative and consistent annotation schemes that went beyond the schemes established for English. Since its first edition in 2002, the TLT workshop series has proven successful in attracting high-quality papers every year, presenting innovative work on various aspects relating treebanks, linguistic theories and computational linguistics. Topics discussed comprise reports on treebank initiatives for novel languages and novel linguistic phenomena; the development of treebanks for historical data sets; the design of annotation schemes and their relation to linguistic theory; the way in which different layers of semantic information can be incorporated into treebanks, and crosslinguistic aspects in building parallel treebanks. Equally important was the discussion of issues of annotation consistency control, semiautomatic annotation techniques including the question of whether treebank annotations should be generated from an underlying treebank grammar, and finally, the exploitation of treebanks for statistically trained NLP components and for linguistic theory, supported by flexible querying and visualisation techniques. Over the last ten years, and with increasing insights in techniques and methods for creating, maintaining and exploiting treebanks for Treebanks: Linking Linguistic Theory to Computational Linguistics / 3 NLP and linguistic theory, the workshop themes have evolved considerably, both in breath and in depth. As will become apparent below, through the brief introduction to the contents of this volume. 2