Detecting and Correcting Errors in an English Tectogrammatical Annotation

We present our first experiments with detecting and correcting errors in a manual annotation of English texts, taken from the Penn Treebank, at the dependency-based tectogrammatical layer, as it is defined in the Prague Dependency Treebank. The main idea is that errors in the annotation usually result in an inconsistency, i. e. the state when a phenomenon is annotated in different ways at several places in a corpus. We describe our algorithm for detecting inconsistencies (it got positive feedback from annotators) and we present some statistics on the manually corrected data and results of a tectogrammatical analyzer which uses these data for its operation. The corrections have improved the data just slightly so far, but we outline some ways to more significant improvement.