Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English: The Penn Treebank

4.1 Bracketing: basic methodology

1. Why was Hindle’s Fidditch parser well suited as a preprocessor for hand bracketing?
   It always gives exactly one analysis; it never attaches a constituent whose role it can’t determine with certainty, leaving a string of tree fragments; and its chunks are usually accurate. Annotators mainly “glue” fragments together.
   • Marcus et al., 1993, Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English (Computational Linguistics), §4.1
2. Which attachments does Fidditch leave undone, and why?
   Prepositional phrases, relative clauses and adverbial modifiers (they need extra-syntactic information), arguments vs adjuncts like infinitives (no large verb lexicon), and conjunction scope; every comma breaks the input into chunks since decisions are local. It does attach of-PPs right after a noun.
   • Marcus et al., 1993, Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English (Computational Linguistics), §4.1