Down-stream effects of tree-to-dependency conversions

Dependency analysis relies on morphosyntactic evidence, as well as semantic evidence. In some cases, however, morphosyntactic evidence seems to be in conflict with semantic evidence. For this reason dependency grammar theories, annotation guidelines and tree-to-dependency conversion schemes often differ in how they analyze various syntactic constructions. Most experiments for which constituent-based treebanks such as the Penn Treebank are converted into dependency treebanks rely blindly on one of four-five widely used tree-to-dependency conversion schemes. This paper evaluates the down-stream effect of choice of conversion scheme, showing that it has dramatic impact on end results.