Building a treebank for French

Very few gold standard annotated corpora are currently available for French. We present an ongoing project to build a reference treebank for French starting with a tagged newspaper corpus of 1 Million words (Abeillé et al., 1998), (Abeillé and Clément, 1999). Similarly to the Penn TreeBank (Marcus et al., 1993), we distinguish an automatic parsing phase followed by a second phase of systematic manual validation and correction. Similarly to the Prague treebank (Hajicova et al., 1998), we rely on several types of morphosyntactic and syntactic annotations for which we define extensive guidelines. Our goal is to provide a theory neutral, surface oriented, error free treebank for French. Similarly to the Negra project (Brants et al., 1999), we annotate both constituents and functional relations. 1. The tagged corpus As reported in (Abeillé and Clément, 1999), we present the general methodology, the automatic tagging phase, the human validation phase and the final state of the tagged corpus. 1.1. Methodology 1.1.1. Choosing the corpus The corpus consists of extracts from the daily newspa