On aligning trees

Abstract

The increasing availability of corpora annotated for linguistic structure prompts the question: if we have the same texts, annotated for phrase structure under two different schemes, to what extent do the annotations agree on structuring within the text? We suggest the term tree alignment to indicate the situation where two markup schemes choose to bracket off the same text elements. We propose a general method for determining agreement between two analyses. We then describe an efficient implementation, which is also modular in that the core of the implementation can be reused regardless of the format of markup used in the corpora. The output of the implementation on the Susanne and Penn treebank corpora is discussed.