Chapter 7

Annotation tools for syntax

This chapter is devoted to the presentation of the tools and methods used for the different steps of the semi-automatic syntactic annotation: automatic preprocessing; microsyntactic parsing with the FRMG tool, correction of the parsing with the Arborator tool, agreement analysis, post-validation correction, and development of the final format of the Rhapsodie syntactic treebank. As FRMG is a parser for written French that was not configured to analyze disfluencies and reformulation, we used our manual pile marking to unfold the piles and produce a series of simplified “sentences” with only government relations. Despite having two annotators plus a validator for the corrections, we found a substantial number of errors in the post-validation procedure by using a set of rules to determine the well-formedness of the trees.