Grammatical Relations's System in Treebank Annotation

The paper presents theoretical aspects and practical issues related to the development of a grammatical relation’s system for corpus annotation. The grammatical relations are arranged on a default inheritance hierarchy based on syntactic and semantic features. Preliminary tests on the annotation of an Italian treebank (the Turin University Treebank) show that the system implements a reasonable tradeoff between richness of the representation and tractability of the annotation task.