From phrase structure to dependencies, and back

Transforming constituent-based annotation into dependency-based annotation has been shown to work for different treebanks and annotation schemes (e.g. Lin (1995) has transformed the Penn treebank, and Kübler and Telljohann (2002) the Tübinger Baumbank des Deutschen (TüBa-D/Z)). These ventures are usually triggered by the conflict between theory-neutral annotation, that targets most needs of a wider audi-ence, and theory-specific annotation, that provides more fine-grained information for a smaller audience. As a compromise, it has been pointed out that treebanks can be designed to support more than one theory from the start (Nivre, 2003). We argue that information can also be added to an existing annotation scheme so that it supports ad-ditional theory-specific annotations. We also argue that such a transformation is useful for improving and extending the original annotation scheme with respect to both am-biguous annotation and annotation errors. We show this by analysing problems that arise when generating dependency information from the constituent-based TüBa-D/Z. TüBa-D/Z is a treebank of German newspaper texts from ‘die tageszeitung ’ using the Topological Field (TopF) model for the syntactic descriptions of sentences (Höhle