I was wondering if there is a published standard corpus of English sentences which are confounding for mechanical parsers. I am looking over sentences given here, and I have the following (very short) list:
- "Jameson was generous; the hawk, greedy" (verb ellipsis)
- "Kindly speak to Sally" vs. "Speak kindly to Sally." (binding "kindly" to "do" vs. "speak")
- "The man gave the cat, the dog, the cow, and the moose, the milk, the bone, the feed, and the hay, respectively" (respectively/in-turn non-context-freeness)
- "I am skipping to the school, which means that I am happy" (the "which" unusually binds the whole action, not the school)
- "John gave the man the book and the woman the pamphlet" ("and" which takes two argument pairs on both sides)
Is there a canonical list of such examples, so I don't have to trawl around for these? I will be happy to accept either a reference, or a reasonable list of nice examples not repeating the issues. I already go through the New York Times or other newspapers, but they generally have complex sentences which only rarely illustrate these issues.