---
title: "German and English Treebanks and Lexica for Tree-Adjoining Grammars — Kaeshammer 2012"
description: "The paper builds a treebank and a lexicon for PLTAG, an incremental, psycholinguistically motivated version of… 30 references, cited by 4 papers here."
authors: ["Miriam Kaeshammer", "Vera Demberg"]
year: 2012
venue: "Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/L12-1204/"
doi: "10.63317/3gbttzmrrnfs"
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/kaeshammer-2012-german-english-treebanks-lexica-tree/"
---
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# German and English Treebanks and Lexica for Tree-Adjoining Grammars

**Authors:** Miriam Kaeshammer and [Vera Demberg](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/vera-demberg/) · **Year:** 2012 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L12-1204](https://aclanthology.org/L12-1204/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only; nothing copied into a release. The resources depend on the licensed Penn Treebank and TIGER corpora: evaluation only.

[**4** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2250353014) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 · **4** citations in our library of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read · [Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/lrec/) · published by [European Language Resources Association (ELRA)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/european-language-resources-association-elra/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L12-1204/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L12-1204.pdf)
- [DOI 10.63317/3gbttzmrrnfs](https://doi.org/10.63317/3gbttzmrrnfs)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2250353014)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Miriam Kaeshammer](https://openalex.org/A5049530747) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/3134029) · h 4 · 45 citations · 10 works
2. [Vera Demberg](https://openalex.org/A5023605306) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8834-0020) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2373007772) · h 28 · 4,098 citations · 314 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 builds a treebank and a lexicon for PLTAG, an incremental, psycholinguistically motivated version of tree-adjoining grammar. The English side is converted from the Penn Treebank, the German side from TIGER. Conversion adds structure the original annotation lacks, so that modifiers can adjoin; German uses sister-adjunction because its free word order produces flat trees. Elementary trees are extracted from the converted trees, and prediction trees are derived from connection paths, so that a parser can predict upcoming structure word by word. The conversion yields complete correct trees for 97.6% of PTB trees and 99.8% of TIGER trees. The English lexicon has about 6,000 tree templates, with 2.37 trees per word on average; the German lexicon is larger because German predicts more.

## For Mova

- I1. `en/src/lin.rs` and [languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register/): a table of multi-word entries with gaps, such as `either ... or` and particle verbs like `show up`, each stored with its positions. Measure how many gold multi-word units in UD EWT dev are recovered by the table.
- I2. Report ambiguity per lemma the way the paper does (trees per word, and the most ambiguous words such as `and`). Keep a count table in `en/src/dict.rs` order, and use it to choose which function words need a rule.
- I3. Prefix-level measure for `en/src/parse.rs`: after each word, count the attachments still open, and report the parser's accuracy on the prefix. This tests the paper's point that a predictive grammar needs fewer open decisions.

The chapters are [languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register/) (multi-word units), [languages/en/13-verbs.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/13-verbs/) (particle verbs) and [languages/en/20-syntax-overview.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/20-syntax-overview/) (the parse). The code is `en/src/dict.rs`, `en/src/parse.rs` and `en/src/lin.rs`. The measures: recall of multi-word units on UD EWT dev, and per-lemma ambiguity counts. Only the ideas and the measures are for Mova; the treebanks themselves are not carried into the build.

## Institutions

[🎓**Saarland University** Saarbrücken · Germany 86 works · 15,761 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/saarland-university/) · [🎓**Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf** Düsseldorf · Germany 12 works · 846 citations](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/heinrich-heine-university-dusseldorf/)

📚 Shelves 4[Computer Science · 7,349 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/) · [Artificial Intelligence · 7,183 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/computer-science/artificial-intelligence/) · [Arts and Humanities · 7,418 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · [Language and Linguistics · 7,357 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/)

🧭 Topics 3[English · 976 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · [Syntax & grammar formalisms · 140 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/syntax-grammar/) · [Treebanks · 114 works](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/treebanks/)

## Cite

Cite as Miriam Kaeshammer and Vera Demberg. 2012. German and English Treebanks and Lexica for Tree-Adjoining Grammars. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12).

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.63317/3gbttzmrrnfs](https://doi.org/10.63317/3gbttzmrrnfs)

```bibtex
@inproceedings{kaeshammer2012german,
  title = {{German and English Treebanks and Lexica for Tree-Adjoining Grammars}},
  author = {Miriam Kaeshammer and Vera Demberg},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'12)},
  year = {2012},
  doi = {10.63317/3gbttzmrrnfs},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3gbttzmrrnfs}
}
```

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## References

30 references, 5 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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Updated 23 October 2026