Correcting Syntactic Annotation Errors Based on Tree Mining

Abstract

This paper provides a new method to correct annotation errors in a treebank. The previous error correction method constructs a pseudo parallel corpus where incorrect partial parse trees are paired with correct ones, and extracts error correction rules from the parallel corpus. By applying these rules to a treebank, the method corrects errors. However, this method does not achieve wide coverage of error correction. To achieve wide coverage, our method adopts a different approach. In our method, we consider that if an infrequent pattern can be transformed to a frequent one, then it is an annotation error pattern. Based on a tree mining technique, our method seeks such infrequent tree patterns, and constructs error correction rules each of which consists of an infrequent pattern and a corresponding frequent pattern. We conducted an experiment using the Penn Treebank. We obtained 1,987 rules which are not constructed by the previous method, and the rules achieved good precision.