More Constructions, More Genres: Extending Stanford Dependencies

The Stanford dependency scheme aims to provide a simple and intuitive but linguistically sound way of annotating the dependencies between words in a sentence. In this paper, we address two limitations the scheme has suffered from: First, despite providing good coverage of core grammatical relations, the scheme has not offered explicit analyses of more difficult syntactic constructions; second, because the scheme was initially developed primarily on newswire data, it did not focus on constructions that are rare in newswire but very frequent in more informal texts, such as casual speech and current web texts. Here, we propose dependency analyses for several linguistically interesting constructions and extend the scheme to provide better coverage of modern web data.