Treebanking in VIT: from Phrase Structure to Dependency Representation

In this chapter, we are dealing with treebanks and their applications. We describe VIT (Venice Italian Treebank), focusing on the syntactic-semantic features of the treebank that are partly dependent on the adopted tagset, partly on the reference linguistic theory, and, lastly - as in every treebank - on the chosen language: Italian. By discussing examples taken from treebanks available in other languages, we show the theoretical and practical differences and motivations that underlie our approach. Finally, we discuss the quantitative analysis of the data of our treebank and compare them to other treebanks. In general, we try to substantiate the claim that treebanking grammars or parsers strongly depend on the chosen treebank; and eventually this process seems to depend both on factors such as the adopted linguistic frame-work for structural description and, ultimately, the described language.