Towards a Large Parallel Corpus of Cleft Constructions

Abstract

We present our efforts to create a large-scale, semi-automatically annotated parallel corpus of cleft constructions. The corpus is intended to reduce or make more effective the manual task of finding examples of clefts in a corpus. The corpus is being developed in the context of the Collaborative Research Centre SFB 632, which is a large, interdisciplinary research initiative to study information structure. We show how state-of-the-art NLP tools, like POS taggers and statistical dependency parsers, may facilitate powerful and precise searches, and we demonstrate through preliminary empirical findings how such a resource may provide new opportunities for the linguistic research of cleft constructions. 1.