--- title: "Semantic Tagging for the Penn Treebank — Palmer 2000" description: "The paper describes a pilot in which running Penn Treebank text is tagged with WordNet senses, following the method of the SENSEVAL exercise. Two…" authors: ["Martha Palmer", "Hoa Trang Dang", "Joseph Rosenzweig"] year: 2000 venue: "Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'00)" source: "https://aclanthology.org/L00-1148/" doi: "10.63317/2ruqev3evewv" 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/palmer-2000-semantic-tagging-penn-treebank/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/palmer-2000-semantic-tagging-penn-treebank/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2000](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2000/) / Semantic Tagging for the Penn Treebank # Semantic Tagging for the Penn Treebank **Authors:** [Martha Palmer](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/martha-palmer/), [Hoa Trang Dang](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/hoa-trang-dang/), [Joseph Rosenzweig](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/joseph-rosenzweig/) · **Year:** 2000 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'00) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L00-1148](https://aclanthology.org/L00-1148/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) (ACL Anthology, before 2016) — summary only **Institutions:** [University of Pennsylvania](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-pennsylvania/) [**6** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2406838261) OpenAlex, 2026-10-14 · **2** citations in our library of the 140884 papers whose bibliographies we read · [Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'00)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L00-1/) · [licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) - [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L00-1148/) - [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L00-1148.pdf) - [DOI 10.63317/2ruqev3evewv](https://doi.org/10.63317/2ruqev3evewv) - [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2406838261) **Authors (3)** 1. [Martha Palmer](https://openalex.org/A5017464054) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9864-6974) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/145755155) · h 57 · 20837 citations · 417 works 2. [Hoa Trang Dang](https://openalex.org/A5109409280) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0009-0006-3009-3465) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2122755) · h 24 · 2953 citations · 48 works 3. [Joseph Rosenzweig](https://openalex.org/A5022054349) [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/6548779) · h 8 · 540 citations · 12 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 a pilot in which running Penn Treebank text is tagged with WordNet senses, following the method of the SENSEVAL exercise. Two annotators tag the verbs and the head words of their noun arguments. A first annotator makes one pass, a second checks the result, and disagreements are marked as unresolved. In the pilot about 2,100 words were sense-tagged, with an overall agreement of 89%; for the 700 verbs, agreement was 81%, and 90 of the 350 verb lemmas had a disagreement. The authors revise WordNet senses when the annotators cannot separate them, and they describe criteria for sense distinctions with the example of *shake*, which WordNet and the Hector resource split differently. The Treebank brackets are also used to add predicate-argument structure automatically with tree patterns; on 65 sentences, 132 of 162 structures (81%) were correct, and hand correction of the 5,000-word corpus took one day. ## Ideas - I1. `prag/src/roles.rs`: write the predicate-argument tree patterns over UD trees (subject, object, indirect object) as explicit rules with the sense of the verb as a condition. Measure precision on a sample of sentences, the way the paper does with 65 sentences. - I2. the dictionary builder: keep the unresolved-sense marker, as the paper's `?` tag, for senses the rules cannot separate. Exclude those tokens from the accuracy count and report them as their own number. - I3. Two passes by two authors on the same lesson sentences, with agreement reported before any discussion; the lemmas with disagreements become the list of senses to revise. ## For Mova The chapters are [languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/19-lexicon-mwe-register/) (senses and multi-word items) and [languages/en/28-voice-and-passive.md](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/28-voice-and-passive/) (argument roles). The code is `prag/src/roles.rs` and the dictionary builder. The measures: predicate-argument precision on a sample, the share of unresolved senses, and the two-pass agreement. The paper's data are NC-licensed and are used here only as a summary. 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 10.63317/2ruqev3evewv](https://doi.org/10.63317/2ruqev3evewv) ```bibtex @inproceedings{palmer2000semantic, title = {{Semantic Tagging for the Penn Treebank}}, author = {Palmer, Martha and Dang, Hoa Trang and Rosenzweig, Joseph}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'00)}, year = {2000}, doi = {10.63317/2ruqev3evewv}, url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2ruqev3evewv} } ``` - [← previous An interlingua aiming at communication on the Web: How language-independent can it be?](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/martins-2000-interlingua-aiming-communication-web-how/) - [next → NP References to Active Participants and Story Development in Ancient Hebrew](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/hbo-2018-levinsohn-np-references-active-participants-story/) - [↑ back to papers of 2000](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2000/) ## References 16 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. 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