Adding Syntactic Annotations to Transcripts of Parent-Child Dialogs

We describe an annotation scheme for syntactic information in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000), which contains several megabytes of transcribed dialogs between parents and children. The annotation scheme is based on grammatical relations (GRs) that are composed of bilexical dependencies (between a head and a dependent) labeled with the name of the relation involving the two words (such as subject, object and adjunct). We also discuss automatic annotation using our syntactic annotation scheme.

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