Treebankstext

Treebankstext is a term used in computational linguistics to refer to the textual content and annotation layers that accompany treebank corpora. It combines the original sentence text with structured linguistic information that indicates syntactic structure, typically at the sentence level. The term emphasizes the textual representation of the data as it is consumed by parsing models and linguistic analysis pipelines.

Constituent-based treebanks usually encode structure using bracket notation or XML- or JSON-based formats, while dependency-based treebanks encode relationships between words. Treebankstext can be stored in bracketed parse trees (as in classic Penn Treebank style), in XML formats such as TigerXML, or in data exchange formats used by modern parsers and universal dependencies.

Content commonly found in treebankstext includes the surface token sequence, part-of-speech tags, phrase structure labels, and sometimes functional or dependency annotations. Metadata may accompany the data, including the source corpus, domain, edition or version, annotator notes, and inter-annotator agreement measurements.

Treebankstext is used to train and evaluate syntactic parsers, study linguistic phenomena, and build multilingual resources. It is produced through a combination of manual annotation by linguists and automated preprocessing, followed by rounds of validation and reconciliation.

Notable treebank projects that contribute to treebankstext resources include the Penn Treebank, the Prague Dependency Treebank, the Universal Dependencies project, and others.