In this article, we introduce the Prague Dependency Treebank of Spoken Czech. The syntactic and semantic annotation of this corpus has led to the expansion of PDT-Vallex, a valency lexicon of Czech verbs, which has previously been linked only to the annotation of written texts. The expansion of the lexicon consisted of several steps: (i) new verbs were added to the lexicon; (ii) new meanings and new valency frames were added to verbs that had already been included in the lexicon; valency frames that had already been part of the lexicon were enriched with (iii) new participants (actants) and (iv) new formal realizations of participants (actants). All the above mentioned enrichments are (a) unmarked and based only on the addition of a new verb, a new meaning, a new participant (actant) or a new form, however, (b) some of them are influenced by the typical characteristics of spoken language. It would be almost impossible to find some of the verbs, some of the meanings, participants or forms in a written text. We believe that verbs in spoken language tend to exhibit different valency behavior than verbs in written texts. In this article we attempt to draw more general conclusions on the valency behavior of verbs in spoken language.
The valency lexicon PDT-Vallex has been built in close connection with the annotation of the Prague Dependency Treebank project (PDT) and its successors (mainly the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank project, PCEDT). It contains over 11000 valency frames for more than 7000 verbs which occurred in the PDT or PCEDT. It is available in electronically processable format (XML) together with the aforementioned treebanks (to be viewed and edited by TrEd, the PDT/PCEDT main annotation tool), and also in more human readable form including corpus examples (see the WEBSITE link below). The main feature of the lexicon is its linking to the annotated corpora - each occurrence of each verb is linked to the appropriate valency frame with additional (generalized) information about its usage and surface morphosyntactic form alternatives.
The valency lexicon PDT-Vallex 4.0 has been built in close connection with the annotation of the Prague Dependency Treebank project (PDT) and its successors (mainly the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank project, PCEDT, the spoken language corpus (PDTSC) and corpus of user-generated texts in the project Faust). It contains over 14500 valency frames for almost 8500 verbs which occurred in the PDT, PCEDT, PDTSC and Faust corpora. In addition, there are nouns, adjectives and adverbs, linked from the PDT part only, increasing the total to over 17000 valency frames for 13000 words. All the corpora have been published in 2020 as the PDT-C 1.0 corpus with the PDT-Vallex 4.0 dictionary included; this is a copy of the dictionary published as a separate item for those not interested in the corpora themselves. It is available in electronically processable format (XML), and also in more human readable form including corpus examples (see the WEBSITE link below, and the links to its main publications elsewhere in this metadata). The main feature of the lexicon is its linking to the annotated corpora - each occurrence of each verb is linked to the appropriate valency frame with additional (generalized) information about its usage and surface morphosyntactic form alternatives. It replaces the previously published unversioned edition of PDT-Vallex from 2014.
Texts
The Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank 2.0 (PCEDT 2.0) is a major update of the Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank 1.0 (LDC2004T25). It is a manually parsed Czech-English parallel corpus sized over 1.2 million running words in almost 50,000 sentences for each part.
Data
The English part contains the entire Penn Treebank - Wall Street Journal Section (LDC99T42). The Czech part consists of Czech translations of all of the Penn Treebank-WSJ texts. The corpus is 1:1 sentence-aligned. An additional automatic alignment on the node level (different for each annotation layer) is part of this release, too. The original Penn Treebank-like file structure (25 sections, each containing up to one hundred files) has been preserved. Only those PTB documents which have both POS and structural annotation (total of 2312 documents) have been translated to Czech and made part of this release.
Each language part is enhanced with a comprehensive manual linguistic annotation in the PDT 2.0 style (LDC2006T01, Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0). The main features of this annotation style are:
dependency structure of the content words and coordinating and similar structures (function words are attached as their attribute values)
semantic labeling of content words and types of coordinating structures
argument structure, including an argument structure ("valency") lexicon for both languages
ellipsis and anaphora resolution.
This annotation style is called tectogrammatical annotation and it constitutes the tectogrammatical layer in the corpus. For more details see below and documentation.
Annotation of the Czech part
Sentences of the Czech translation were automatically morphologically annotated and parsed into surface-syntax dependency trees in the PDT 2.0 annotation style. This annotation style is sometimes called analytical annotation; it constitutes the analytical layer of the corpus. The manual tectogrammatical (deep-syntax) annotation was built as a separate layer above the automatic analytical (surface-syntax) parse. A sample of 2,000 sentences was manually annotated on the analytical layer.
Annotation of the English part
The resulting manual tectogrammatical annotation was built above an automatic transformation of the original phrase-structure annotation of the Penn Treebank into surface dependency (analytical) representations, using the following additional linguistic information from other sources:
PropBank (LDC2004T14)
VerbNet
NomBank (LDC2008T23)
flat noun phrase structures (by courtesy of D. Vadas and J.R. Curran)
For each sentence, the original Penn Treebank phrase structure trees are preserved in this corpus together with their links to the analytical and tectogrammatical annotation. and Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic projects No.:
MSM0021620838
LC536
ME09008
LM2010013
7E09003+7E11051
7E11041
Czech Science Foundation, grants No.:
GAP406/10/0875
GPP406/10/P193
GA405/09/0729
Research funds of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Czech Republic, Grant Agency of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic: No. 1ET101120503
Students participating in this project have been running their own student grants from the Grant Agency of the Charles University, which were connected to this project. Only ongoing projects are mentioned: 116310, 158010, 3537/2011
Also, this work was funded in part by the following projects sponsored by the European Commission:
Companions, No. 034434
EuroMatrix, No. 034291
EuroMatrixPlus, No. 231720
Faust, No. 247762
A richly annotated and genre-diversified language resource, The Prague Dependency Treebank – Consolidated 1.0 (PDT-C 1.0, or PDT-C in short in the sequel) is a consolidated release of the existing PDT-corpora of Czech data, uniformly annotated using the standard PDT scheme. PDT-corpora included in PDT-C: Prague Dependency Treebank (the original PDT contents, written newspaper and journal texts from three genres); Czech part of Prague Czech-English Dependency Treebank (translated financial texts, from English), Prague Dependency Treebank of Spoken Czech (spoken data, including audio and transcripts and multiple speech reconstruction annotation); PDT-Faust (user-generated texts). The difference from the separately published original treebanks can be briefly described as follows: it is published in one package, to allow easier data handling for all the datasets; the data is enhanced with a manual linguistic annotation at the morphological layer and new version of morphological dictionary is enclosed; a common valency lexicon for all four original parts is enclosed. Documentation provides two browsing and editing desktop tools (TrEd and MEd) and the corpus is also available online for searching using PML-TQ.
The Prague Dependency Treebank 2.0 (PDT 2.0) contains a large amount of Czech texts with complex and interlinked morphological (two million words), syntactic (1.5 MW) and complex semantic annotation (0.8 MW); in addition, certain properties of sentence information structure and coreference relations are annotated at the semantic level.
PDT 2.0 is based on the long-standing Praguian linguistic tradition, adapted for the current Computational Linguistics research needs. The corpus itself uses the latest annotation technology. Software tools for corpus search, annotation and language analysis are included. Extensive documentation (in English) is provided as well. and 1ET101120413 (Data a nástroje pro informační systémy) MSM 0021620838 (Moderní metody, struktury a systémy informatiky) 1ET101120503 (Integrace jazykových zdrojů za účelem extrakce informací z přirozených textů) 1P05ME752 (Vícejazyčný valenční a predikátový slovník přirozeného jazyka) LC536 (Centrum komputační lingvistiky)
The Prague Dependency Treebank 3.5 is the 2018 edition of the core Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT). It contains all PDT annotation made at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics under various projects between 1996 and 2018 on the original texts, i.e., all annotation from PDT 1.0, PDT 2.0, PDT 2.5, PDT 3.0, PDiT 1.0 and PDiT 2.0, plus corrections, new structure of basic documentation and new list of authors covering all previous editions. The Prague Dependency Treebank 3.5 (PDT 3.5) contains the same texts as the previous versions since 2.0; there are 49,431 annotated sentences (832,823 words) on all layers, from tectogrammatical annotation to syntax to morphology. There are additional annotated sentences for syntax and morphology; the totals for the lower layers of annotation are: 87,913 sentences with 1,502,976 words at the analytical layer (surface dependency syntax) and 115,844 sentences with 1,956,693 words at the morphological layer of annotation (these totals include the annotation with the higher layers annotated as well). Closely linked to the tectogrammatical layer is the annotation of sentence information structure, multiword expressions, coreference, bridging relations and discourse relations.
The Prague Dependency Treebank of Spoken Czech 2.0 (PDTSC 2.0) is a corpus of spoken language, consisting of 742,316 tokens and 73,835 sentences, representing 7,324 minutes (over 120 hours) of spontaneous dialogs. The dialogs have been recorded, transcribed and edited in several interlinked layers: audio recordings, automatic and manual transcripts and manually reconstructed text. These layers were part of the first version of the corpus (PDTSC 1.0). Version 2.0 is extended by an automatic dependency parser at the analytical and by the manual annotation of “deep” syntax at the tectogrammatical layer, which contains semantic roles and relations as well as annotation of coreference.