Automatic Assignment of Grammatical Relations

This paper presents a method for the assignment of grammatical relation labels in a sentence structure. The method has been implemented in the software tool AGRA (Automatic Grammatical Relation Assigner), which is part of a project for the development of a treebank of Italian sentences, and a knowledge base of Italian subcategorization frames. The annotation schema implements a notion of underspecification, that arranges grammatical relations from generic to specific one onto a hierarchy; the software tool works with hand-coded rules, which apply heuristic knowledge (on syntactic and semantic cues) to distinguish between complements and modifiers.