## Annotation manual for the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English

Citation: Beatrice Santorini. 2022-. Annotation manual for the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English. https://github.com/beatrice57/annotation-guidelines-for-ppche.

This annotation manual is the latest revision of previous versions (2004, 2016). It is heavily indebted to the original document developed by Ann Taylor and Anthony Kroch for Middle English (Kroch and Taylor 2000) as well as to the spirit of the guidelines for the Penn Treebank (Marcus, Santorini, and Marcinkiewicz 1993).

The substance of the guidelines remains largely unchanged, but the annotation scheme has been streamlined (see Changes), and the differences between the annotation of Middle English and (Early) Modern English have been reduced. Certain differences remain, however, which are occasioned by the syntactic differences between Middle English and later stages of the language. Except where necessary, the examples in the body of the manual are from (Early) Modern English.

The guidelines are in force for:

- Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, second edition (PCEEC2)
- Parsed Ellegård examples
- Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (2025 release)
  Information for the 2016 release is available here).
  - Penn Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second edition
  - Penn Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English
  - Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English, second edition

Clarifications and corrections are posted at:

- https://github.com/beatrice57/annotation-guidelines-for-ppche
- https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/corpus-ling/annotation-2022

The guidelines were developed for English, but they have been used as a foundation for annotation guidelines for parsed corpora of various other Germanic and Romance languages. The general idea is that the present guidelines apply as a default except where overruled by language-particular considerations that are set out in a corpus-particular manual.

Suggestions for improvement may be sent to Beatrice Santorini (beatrice DOT santorini AT gmail DOT com).

### Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to the following institutions and individuals for support and assistance:

- The National Endowment for the Humanities for financial support under NEH Grant PA 23382-99.

- The National Science Foundation for financial support under NSF Grant BCS 99-05488.

- The National Science Foundation for financial support under NSF Grants BCS 05-08731 and BCS 11-47499.

- The users of the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English for their ongoing financial support in purchasing the corpora.

- Anthony Kroch and Ann Taylor for many helpful discussions concerning the original guidelines for the PPCME2 and their adaptation to later stages of English.

- Hezekiah Bacovcin for assistance with lemmatization.

### References

- Kroch, Anthony. 2020. Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English LDC2020T16. Web download. Philadelphia: Linguistic Data Consortium, https://catalog.ldc.upenn.edu/LDC2020T16.

- Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini, and Lauren Delfs. 2004. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME). Distributed as part of Kroch 2020. Individual website: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/ppche-release-2016/PPCEME-RELEASE-3.

- Kroch, Anthony, Beatrice Santorini, and Ariel Diertani. 2016. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Modern British English, second edition (PPCMBE2) Distributed as part of Kroch 2020. Individual website: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/ppche-release-2016/PPCMBE-RELEASE-1.

- Kroch, Anthony, and Ann Taylor. 2000. Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second edition (PPCME2). Distributed as part of Kroch 2020. Individual website: http://www.ling.upenn.edu/ppche-release-2016/PPCME2-RELEASE-4.

- Marcus, Mitchell, Beatrice Santorini, and Mary Ann Marcinkiewicz. 1993. Building a large annotated corpus of English: The Penn Treebank. Computational linguistics 19, 313-330. Reprinted in Susan Armstrong, ed., 1994, Using large corpora. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 273–290.

- Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, second edition, parsed version. 2022. Revised and corrected by Beatrice Santorini. Annotated by Ann Taylor, Arja Nurmi, Anthony Warner, Susan Pintzuk, and Terttu Nevalainen. Compiled by the CEEC Project Team. https://github.com/beatrice57/pceec2