The Finnish Proposition Bank

We present the Finnish PropBank, a resource for semantic role labeling (SRL) of Finnish based on the Turku Dependency Treebank whose syntax is annotated in the well-known Stanford Dependency (SD) scheme. The contribution of this paper consists of the lexicon of the verbs and their arguments present in the treebank, as well as the predicate-argument annotation of all verb occurrences in the treebank text. We demonstrate that the annotation is of high quality, that the SD scheme is highly compatible with PropBank annotation, and further that the additional dependencies present in the Turku Dependency Treebank are clearly beneficial for PropBank annotation. Further, we also use the PropBank to provide a strong baseline for automated Finnish SRL using a machine learning SRL system developed for the SemEval’14 shared task on broad-coverage semantic dependency parsing. The PropBank as well as the SRL system are available under a free license at http://bionlp.utu.fi/ .