---
title: "ProPOSEL — paper by Brierley and Atwell (2008)"
description: "Brierley and Atwell present ProPOSEL, a prototype English lexicon that brings prosodic and… 30 references, cited by 5 papers here."
authors: ["Claire Brierley", "Eric Atwell"]
year: 2008
venue: "Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/L08-1441/"
licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/brierley-2008-proposel-prosody-pos-english-lexicon/"
---
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# ProPOSEL: A Prosody and POS English Lexicon for Language Engineering

**Authors:** [Claire Brierley](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/claire-brierley/) and [Eric Atwell](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/eric-atwell/) · **Year:** 2008 · **Venue:** [Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/lrec/) ([LREC 2008](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/lrec/2008/)) · **Publisher:** [European Language Resources Association (ELRA)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/european-language-resources-association-elra/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L08-1441/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L08-1441.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W200561625)

**Citations:** 10 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [5](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/brierley-2008-proposel-prosody-pos-english-lexicon/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Brierley and Atwell present ProPOSEL, a prototype English lexicon that brings prosodic and part-of-speech information together in one place. It is built mainly to support automatic prosodic phrase break prediction, which decides whether each gap between words in text is a break or a non-break. Existing pronunciation dictionaries such as CELEX-2 and CMU were made for ASR and carry little or no word-class detail. The authors therefore start from CUVPlus, which tags wordforms with BNC C5 tags. They split its combined PoS field so that every wordform–tag pair becomes its own entry, then add:

- phonology from CELEX-2 and CMU: SAM-PA and IPA transcriptions, syllable counts and lexical stress patterns;
- equivalent tags in the Penn Treebank, LOB and C7 schemes;
- a default content/function word label.

The result is a text file of 104,052 entries. It is meant for release with NLTK and comes with Python tools and a tutorial. These let users load the lexicon as a dictionary keyed on (wordform, C5 tag) and annotate tagged corpora with prosodic features. The paper also shows the gaps that appear when mapping between tagsets.

## Key points
- Sources: CUVPlus (itself derived from CUV2 and OALD), CELEX-2, the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, plus tag schemes from the BNC (C5), LOB, Penn Treebank and C7.
- Each of the 104,052 entries has 14 pipe-separated fields. These include C5 tag, capitalisation flag, SAM-PA, frequency ratings, syllable count, stress pattern, Penn tag, content/function tag, LOB tag, C7 tag, syllabified IPA, and per-syllable stress values.
- Stress is coded as a digit string. For example, *objectivity* is 20,100. Homographs can differ by PoS: *present* is 10 as an adjective or noun but 01 as a verb.
- C5 officially has 62 tags, but the lexicon contains 95 C5 items because it includes clitic and possessive combinations such as PNP+VMO and NP0+POS. Mapping C5 to LOB produced 39 one-to-many cases, about 41%.
- Corpus tokens are looked up by (token, tag) keys and gain extra feature values. Unseen tag variants are explicitly marked "No match". Function words and enclitics remain open problems for the content/function and stress defaults.

## Interesting ideas
- Use (wordform, PoS) as the lexicon key instead of the bare wordform, so that features which depend on word class, such as the stress of *present*, never get blended across readings.
- Build tagset crosswalks from a single lexicon that stores several tag schemes side by side, then count one-to-many mappings to find where the schemes disagree.
- Represent word rhythm as a compact symbolic stress string (e.g. 010) that can serve directly as a classifier feature, rather than only as a raw syllable count.
- Return an explicit "No match" whenever a corpus token's tag variant is absent from the lexicon, instead of silently falling back. This makes coverage gaps visible and countable.
- Store a default content/function label per entry while explicitly allowing mixed cases, such as "CF" for a contraction like *aren't*. Treat that label as a default that context may override.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (tokens): The crate en lexicon could key morphology and lemma attributes on (form, UPOS/XPOS) pairs, so homograph features are always resolved by the tagger's choice.
- **I2** (tree): When converting treebanks between UD dialects or XPOS schemes, a per-word parallel-tag table could expose lossy mappings automatically instead of relying on hand-written rules.
- **I3** (back): The generation side could use stress patterns to choose among paraphrases or to place natural pauses and phrase boundaries when it renders text from the meaning graph.
- **I4** (learn): Silver-data pipelines could log unmatched (form, tag) lookups as a measurable negative signal that points to missing lexicon entries or tagger drift.
- **I5** (frames): Speech-act and implicature rules in prag could start from such defaults for auxiliaries and clitics, then refine them with the dependency context to keep decisions explainable.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [University of Leeds](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-leeds/) — University, Leeds, United Kingdom · 40 works · 1,822 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Claire Brierley and Eric Atwell. 2008. ProPOSEL: A Prosody and POS English Lexicon for Language Engineering. Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{brierley2008proposel,
  title = {{ProPOSEL: A Prosody and POS English Lexicon for Language Engineering}},
  author = {Claire Brierley and Eric Atwell},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)},
  year = {2008},
  doi = {10.63317/34b2qwwgmhhd},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/34b2qwwgmhhd}
}
```

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## References

30 references, 0 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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