A while back I was looking into treebanks (something that a future edition of CLM should probably spend more time on than the current one, which basically just points out that they exist). I created some small treebanks, trying out different parsers and manually correcting their output. In order to find errors in the parse, I used Yoichiro Hasebe’s great online tool RSyntaxTree – so named because it is written in Ruby, not, unfortunately, in R – to visualize the trees.

Then it struck me how great it would be if I could actually use R to draw the trees for me instead. I looked around for a package that would do this, and I don’t remember if I couldn’t find one or if I just didn’t like what I found. Anyway, I decided to come up with a way on my own – and I did, relying almost exclusively on existing packages. This post describes how. Continue reading →