Detecting Embedded Tensed Clauses

[Lisa S. Pearl]

Dear Adam,

I don't know which datasets you need this for, but my colleague Jon Sprouse and I have annotated some of the American English child-directed speech datasets with Penn Treebank-like information as part of a larger project, which may make it easier to directly search for embedded clauses with tensed verbs.  For example, the annotation looks like the following:


(S1 (S (NP (PRP he))

     (VP (MD can)

      (NOT n't)

      (VP (VB write)

       (SBAR (WHADVP (WRB when)) (S (NP (PRP you)) (VP (VBP jump))))))

     (. .)))

"he can't write when you jump.", (from the Brown-Adam corpus) where "when you jump" would be an embedded tensed clause because it's in an SBAR and "jump" has the node label VBP, which indicates non-3rd singular present tense (as compared to VB, which would be the non-tensed version).

This derived corpus is available through the CHILDES database in the derived corpora section (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/derived/ ) and also at our university website (http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/CoLaLab/TestingUG/childestreebank.html ).

A tool that's useful for automatically searching through these kind of annotated trees is the Stanford NLP Group's tool Tregex, which is freely available here:
http://nlp.stanford.edu/software/tregex.shtml#Download

-Lisa

On Aug 24, 2012, at 6:53 AM, info-childes at googlegroups.com wrote:

>  Detecting Embedded Tensed Clauses 
>  
> From: Adam Goodkind <a.goodkind at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: <info-childes at googlegroups.com>
> Date: Thursday, August 23, 2012 8:42 AM
> To: <info-childes at googlegroups.com>
> Subject: Detecting Embedded Tensed Clauses
>  
> Hi,
>  
> Using the various search protocols and meta-data levels, is it possible to
> detect embedded tensed clauses, i.e. embedded clauses with a tensed verb? I
> have been trying to create a combination of criteria, involving, e.g. CPRED,
> COMP, CJCT, CMOD, CPZR, etc., but with a low success rate.
>  
> Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.
>  
> Thanks,
> Adam
>  
> -- 
> Adam Goodkind 
> w adamgoodkind.com <http://www.adamgoodkind.com/>
> t @adamgreatkind <https://twitter.com/#!/adamgreatkind>
>  
> -- 
>  

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