Towards Parallel Czech-Russian Dependency Treebank

Proceedings of the Workshop on Annotation and Exploitation of Parallel Corpora AEPC 2010. Editors: Lars Ahrenberg, Jörg Tiedemann and Martin Volk. NEALT Proceedings Series, Vol. 10 (2010), 44-52. © 2010 The editors and contributors. Published by Northern European Association for Language Technology (NEALT) http://omilia.uio.no/nealt . Electronically published at Tartu University Library (Estonia) http://hdl.handle.net/10062/15893

What we have learned from complex annotation of topic-focus articulation in a large Czech corpus

After a short summary of the theory of Topic-Focus Articulation (TFA) the present contribution documents on several examples illustrating the annotation of the basic features of TFA on a large corpus (the Prague Dependency Treebank) that corpus annotation brings an additional value to the corpus if the following two conditions are being met: (i) the annotation scheme is based on a sound linguistic theory, and (ii) the annotation scenario is carefully (i.e. systematically and consistently) designed. Such an annotation is important not only for the surface shape of the sentence but even more for the underlying sentence structure: it may elucidate phenomena hidden on the surface but unavoidable for the representation of the meaning and functioning of the sentence