Treebank annotation for formal semantics research

This paper motivates and describes treebank annotation for Japanese and English following a scheme adapted from the Annotation manual for the Penn Historical Corpora and the PCEEC (Santorini 2010). The purpose of this annotation is to create a syntactic base from which meaning representations can be built automatically on a corpus linguistics scale (thousands of examples). Advantages of the adopted annotation scheme are highlighted. Most notably, marking clause level functional information is essential for deterministically building meaning representations beyond the predicate-argument structure level. Also an internal syntax where phrasal categories are fundamentally similar is of great assistance. Finally, the paper demonstrates how scope information is simple to add when bracketed syntactic structure is inherently flat.