This document gives a brief overview of the conversion of the Penn Treebank (Marcus et al., 1993, 1994) to the dependency structures used in the CoNLL-2008 SharedTask. Our dependency framework has the following properties: • single-head: every word has exactly one parent, except the root, which has no parent. • single-root: only one word in the sentence is root. • traceless: the dependency structures use no empty categories. Special arc labels are used to encode gapping. • nonprojective: some long-distance syntactic phenomena are represented in the dependency structure by means of non-local links. The conversion procedure relies on earlier work on constituent-to-dependency conversion (Magerman, 1994; Collins, 1999; Yamada and Matsumoto, 2003; Johansson and Nugues, 2007). In addition, we imported dependencies inside NPs and hyphenated words from a version of the Penn Treebank mapped into GLARF, the Grammatical and Logical Argument Representation Framework (Meyers et al., 2001). To assign dependency labels, we used the following general principles: • If there is a Treebank label other than CLR, HLN, NOM, TPC, or TTL: use this label. • If the link is inside an NP or a hyphenated word: use the label from GLARF. • Else infer a label using a set of rules. The complete set of labels is listed in Section 4.