The GUM corpus: creating multilayer resources in the classroom

• Published in: Language Resources and Evaluation Vol. 51; no. 3; pp. 581 - 612
• Main Author: Zeldes, Amir
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Dordrecht Springer 01-09-2017; Springer Netherlands; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Annotations; Classrooms; Coalescing; Computational Linguistics; Computer Science; Cooperative learning; Corpus linguistics; Curriculum development; Extensible Markup Language; Form classes; Indication; Language and Literature; Linguistics; Original Paper; Parsing; Rhetorical structure theory; Social Sciences; Software; Speech; Tagging (Computational linguistics); Coreference; Multilayer corpora; Parsing; Information structure; Treebank; Classroom annotation
• ISSN: 1574-020X; 1572-8412; 1574-0218
• DOI: 10.1007/s10579-016-9343-x

This paper presents the methodology, design principles and detailed evaluation of a new freely available multilayer corpus, collected and edited via classroom annotation using collaborative software. After briefly discussing corpus design for open, extensible corpora, five classroom annotation projects are presented, covering structural markup in TEI XML, multiple part of speech tagging, constituent and dependency parsing, information structural and coreference annotation, and Rhetorical Structure Theory analysis. Layers are inspected for annotation quality and together they coalesce to form a richly annotated corpus that can be used to study the interactions between different levels of linguistic description. The evaluation gives an indication of the expected quality of a corpus created by students with relatively little training. A multifactorial example study on lexical NP coreference likelihood is also presented, which illustrates some applications of the corpus. The results of this project show that high quality, richly annotated resources can be created effectively as part of a linguistics curriculum, opening new possibilities not just for research, but also for corpora in linguistics pedagogy.