LinGO Redwoods

Reflecting an increased need for stochastic parse selection models over hand-built linguistic grammars and a lack of appropriately detailed training material, we present the Linguistic Grammars On-Line (LinGo) Redwoods initiative, a seed activity in the design and development of a new type of treebank. LinGo Redwoods aims at the development of a novel treebanking methodology, (i) rich in nature and dynamic in both (ii) the ways linguistic data can be retrieved from the treebank in varying granularity and (iii) the constant evolution and regular updating of the treebank itself, synchronized to the development of ideas in syntactic theory. Starting in June 2001, the project has been working to build the foundations for this new type of treebank, develop a basic set of tools required for treebank construction and maintenance, and construct an initial set of 10,000 annotated trees to be distributed together with the tools under an open-source license.