A Gold Standard Dependency Corpus for English

We present a gold standard annotation of syntactic dependencies in the English Web Treebank corpus using the Stanford Dependencies standard. This resource addresses the lack of a gold standard dependency treebank for English, as well as the limited availability of gold standard syntactic annotations for informal genres of English text. We also present experiments on the use of this resource, both for training dependency parsers and for evaluating dependency parsers like the one included as part of the Stanford Parser. We show that training a dependency parser on a mix of newswire and web data improves performance on that type of data without greatly hurting performance on newswire text, and therefore gold standard annotations for non-canonical text can be valuable for parsing in general. Furthermore, the systematic annotation effort has informed both the SD formalism and its implementation in the Stanford Parser’s dependency converter. In response to the challenges encountered by annotators in the EWT corpus, we revised and extended the Stanford Dependencies standard, and improved the Stanford Parser’s dependency converter.