Treebanking in VIT: from Phrase Structure to Dependency Representation

In this chapter we will be dealing with treebanks, existing treebanks and their application fields. We will then describe VIT (Venice Italian Treebank), focussing on the syntactic-semantic features of the treebank that are partly dependent on the adopted tagset, partly on the reference linguistic theory, and, lastly as in every treebank on the chosen language: Italian. By discussing examples taken from treebanks available in other languages, we will show the theoretical and practical differences and motivations that lie behind our approach. In the end, we will discuss the quantitative analysis of the data of our treebank comparing them to other treebanks. In general, we will try to substantiate the claim that treebanking grammars or parsers is dramatically dependent on the chosen treebank; and eventually this process seems to be dependent both on substantial factors such as the adopted linguistic framework for structural description and, ultimately, the described language.