Parsing and Subcategorization Data

In this paper, we compare the performance of a state-of-the-art statistical parser (Bikel, 2004) in parsing written and spoken language and in generating subcategorization cues from written and spoken language. Although Bikel’s parser achieves a higher accuracy for parsing written language, it achieves a higher accuracy when extracting subcategorization cues from spoken language. Our experiments also show that current technology for extracting subcategorization frames initially designed for written texts works equally well for spoken language. Additionally, we explore the utility of punctuation in helping parsing and extraction of subcategorization cues. Our experiments show that punctuation is of little help in parsing spoken language and extracting subcategorization cues from spoken language. This indicates that there is no need to add punctuation in transcribing spoken corpora simply in order to help parsers.