This paper presents Autobank, a prototype tool for constructing a wide-coverage Minimalist Grammar (MG) (Stabler, 1997), and semi-automatically converting the Penn Treebank (PTB) into a deep Minimalist treebank. The front end of the tool is a graphical user interface which facilitates the rapid development of a seed set of MG trees via manual reanno-tation of PTB preterminals with MG lexical categories. The system then extracts various dependency mappings between the source and target trees, and uses these in concert with a non-statistical MG parser to automatically reannotate the rest of the corpus. Autobank thus enables deep tree-bank conversions (and subsequent modifications) without the need for complex transduction algorithms accompanied by cascades of ad hoc rules; instead, the locus of human effort falls directly on the task of grammar construction itself.
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