The Proposition Bank (PropBank)

The Original PropBank

The original PropBank project, funded by ACE, created a corpus of text annotated with information about basic semantic propositions. Predicate-argument relations were added to the syntactic trees of the Penn Treebank. This resource is now available via LDC.

Propbank Today

This project was continued under NSF funding and DARPA GALE and BOLT. The most well-known of these modern resources are the pointers released under The Ontonotes 5, which expanded to other genres, such as broadcast news, webtext, and conversation, more recent annotations with the funding of DARPA-BOLT, NIH and Google have annotated SMS conversations, corpora of questions, the English Web Treebank, and even clinical notes. When licensing allows, the PropBank annotations of these corpora will be released and maintained here. Propbank annotation is done at CLEAR under the supervision of Martha Palmer

Propbank Frame development

PropBank has also been mapped to VerbNet and FrameNet as part of SemLink: Mapping together PropBank/VerbNet/FrameNet, and one can browse a combined representation of those three resources at the Unified Verb Index. PropBank's coverage has also been extended to provide support for AMR annotation (which uses PropBank frame files), unifying Propbank rolesets across different parts of speech. This is being funded by DARPA under the DEFT project. For more information regarding frames, consult the history of the frame releases, or a description of the changes in the new 3.0 Propbank frames. A corresponding DTD file is included in each frame release.

Citing Propbank

The following are three of the core Propbank citations. For more papers, consult the bibliography

Paul Kingsbury and Martha Palmer.From Treebank to PropBank. 2002. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2002), Las Palmas, Spain.

Martha Palmer, Dan Gildea, Paul Kingsbury, The Proposition Bank: A Corpus Annotated with Semantic Roles Computational Linguistics Journal, 31:1, 2005.

The Necessity of Parsing for Predicate Argument Recognition. Daniel Gildea and Martha Palmer. 2002. In Proceedings of ACL 2002, Philadelphia, PA.

For citing the new unified frame files, use:

Claire Bonial, Julia Bonn, Kathryn Conger, Jena Hwang and Martha Palmer (2014) PropBank: Semantics of New Predicate Types. The 9th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference. Reykjavik, Iceland.

Claire Bonial, Kathryn Conger, Jena D. Hwang, Aous Mansouri, Yahya Aseri, Julia Bonn, Timothy O’Gorman, & Martha Palmer, (in press), Current Directions in English and Arabic PropBank, In The Handbook of Linguistic Annotations. Ed. James Pustejovsky and Nancy Ide. Springer.

For the latest version 3.4 release:

Sameer Pradhan, Julia Bonn, Skatje Myers, Kathryn Conger, Tim O’gorman, James Gung, Kristin Wright-bettner, and Martha Palmer. 2022. PropBank Comes of Age—Larger, Smarter, and more Diverse. In Proceedings of the 11th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics, pages 278–288, Seattle, Washington. Association for Computational Linguistics.