Comparing Dependency and Constituent Syntax for Frame-semantic Analysis

Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008)

Abstract

We address the question of which syntactic representation is best suited for role-semantic analysis of English in the FrameNet paradigm. We compare systems based on dependencies and constituents, and a dependency syntax with a rich set of grammatical functions with one with a smaller set. Our experiments show that dependency-based and constituent-based analyzers give roughly equivalent performance, and that a richer set of functions has a positive influence on argument classification for verbs.