---
title: "A Dependency Treebank for English — Rambow 2002"
description: "The paper describes the syntactic layer of the ISLE project, a small corpus of about 13,000 words of transcribed travel-agent speech with multiple…"
authors: ["Owen Rambow", "Cassandre Creswell", "Rachel Szekely", "Harriet Taber", "Marilyn Walker"]
year: 2002
venue: "Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/L02-1325/"
doi: "10.63317/4a5i32vsa5rt"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bank-2002-rambow-dependency-treebank-english/"
---
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# A Dependency Treebank for English

**Authors:** [Owen Rambow](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/owen-rambow/), Cassandre Creswell, Rachel Szekely, Harriet Taber and [Marilyn Walker](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/marilyn-walker/) · **Year:** 2002 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L02-1325](https://aclanthology.org/L02-1325/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) — summary only

[**31** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W88842142) OpenAlex · 2026-10-14 · [**14** citations in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bank-2002-rambow-dependency-treebank-english/cited-by/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read · [Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L02-1/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L02-1325/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L02-1325.pdf)
- [DOI 10.63317/4a5i32vsa5rt](https://doi.org/10.63317/4a5i32vsa5rt)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W88842142)

**Authors (5)**

1. [Owen Rambow](https://openalex.org/A5021314411) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2054-039X) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1702447) · h 45 · 8876 citations · 420 works
2. [Cassandre Creswell](https://openalex.org/A5091633841) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1873937) · h 5 · 95 citations · 20 works
3. [Rachel Szekely](https://openalex.org/A5056486820) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0009-0002-7523-1121) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2307295) · h 5 · 482 citations · 21 works
4. [Harriet Taber](https://openalex.org/A5010003523) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1409255091) · h 2 · 36 citations · 3 works
5. [Marilyn Walker](https://openalex.org/A5102868325) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3306-6439) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2234088162) · h 51 · 8434 citations · 212 works

Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper describes the syntactic layer of the ISLE project, a small corpus of about 13,000 words of transcribed travel-agent speech with multiple annotation levels. The authors choose dependency rather than phrase structure because predicate-argument structure is what applications need, and because phrase-structure treebanks such as the Penn Treebank need head-percolation heuristics to get it. The annotation is a single monostratal dependency level with no separate surface tree; function words attach to their lexical heads, so auxiliaries depend on the main verb. Each word carries a surface role and a deep role. On one 272-word dialogue, inter-annotator agreement is 93 to 94% for POS and features, 95% for the surface role, and at least 99% for the other fields. The paper reports a pace of about 30 words per hour.

## Ideas

- I1. Per-field agreement report: adopt the paper's field-by-field agreement table (POS, features, role) for the `annot` silver checks, computed on 300 EWT sentences between Haiku and Opus output, so that the weak fields are visible per batch.
- I2. Spoken-dialogue probe: report LAS on the ATIS queries (current 63.0, lowercased) split by whether the sentence contains an auxiliary or a fronted wh-word, since these are the constructions the paper works through.
- I3. Dialogue test set (no training): build a held-out set of short dialogue turns in `treebanks/en/` from material we are free to use, to test `en` on speech-like input; keep it out of the training pool.

## For Mova

The code is `annot` (batch annotation and its gates) and `en parse-eval` for the probe. The chapters are [languages/en/26-questions.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/26-questions/) (wh-questions and inversion) and `37-register-and-variation.md` (speech-like registers). The paper's main lesson for Mova is that per-field agreement, not one overall score, decides where the teacher is trusted.

Topics: [Treebanks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/treebanks/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.63317/4a5i32vsa5rt](https://doi.org/10.63317/4a5i32vsa5rt)

```bibtex
@inproceedings{rambow2002dependency,
  title = {{A Dependency Treebank for English}},
  author = {Rambow, Owen and Creswell, Cassandre and Szekely, Rachel and Taber, Harriet and Walker, Marilyn},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'02)},
  year = {2002},
  doi = {10.63317/4a5i32vsa5rt},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4a5i32vsa5rt}
}
```

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## References

14 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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9. Mitchell M. Marcus, Beatrice Santorini, and Mary Ann Marcinkiewicz. 1993. Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English: The Penn Treebank. Computational Linguistics, 19.2:313–330, June. [↗](https://doi.org/10.21236/ada273556) [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/bank-1993-marcus-building-large-annotated-corpus-english/)
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