Corpus Creation for New Genres: A Crowdsourced Approach to PP Attachment

This paper explores the task of building an accurate prepositional phrase attachment corpus for new genres while avoiding a large investment in terms of time and money by crowdsourcing judgments. We develop and present a system to extract prepositional phrases and their potential attachments from ungrammatical and informal sentences and pose the subsequent disambiguation tasks as multiple choice questions to workers from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Our analysis shows that this two-step approach is capable of producing reliable annotations on informal and potentially noisy blog text, and this semi-automated strategy holds promise for similar annotation projects in new genres.