Dr. Owen Rambow receives a Google Research Award

Normalization of i18n Treebanks

In a joint project with Lori Levin (CMU) (who independently received a related Google award), Owen Rambow will define a syntactic representation which will abstract as much as possible from language-specific differences.

The new representation is called SUPA (Syntax based on a Universal Predicate-Argument Representation).  Rambow will develop a framework for transferring existing treebanks into SUPA using rules written by syntacticians.  The work holds the promise that cross-lingual computational work on syntax can concentrate on actual linguistic differences between languages rather than on differences in the representation scheme.