Current Directions in English and Arabic PropBank

This chapter gives an overview of the infrastructure, annotation practices, and current challenges of both the English and Arabic PropBank corpora. More details about the Hindi and Urdu PropBanks can be found in chapter “ The Hindi/Urdu Treebank Project” (this volume). The focus of current efforts is on expanding the types of relations covered by PropBank. Previously, the annotation effort focused on event relations expressed solely by verbs. (A separate but related effort, NomBank, focused on nouns [26].) However, a complete representation of event relations within and across sentences requires expanding that focus to all syntactic realizations of event and state semantics, including expressions in the form of nouns, adjectives and multi-word expressions. This effort reflects a general desire to move to a deeper level of semantic understanding, abstracting away from language-particular syntactic facts. The chapter closes with a discussion of future directions for PropBank.

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