We present a user-centered approach for defining the dependency syntactic specification for a treebank. We show that by collecting information on syntactic interpretations from the future users of the treebank, we can model so far dependency-syntactically undefined syntactic structures in a way that corresponds to the users’ intuition. By consulting the users at the grammar definition phase we aim at better usage of the treebank in the future. We focus on two complex syntactic phenomena: elliptical comparative clauses and participial NPs or NPs with a verb-derived noun as their head. We show how the phenomena can be interpreted in several ways and ask for the users’ intuitive way of modeling them. The results aid in constructing the syntactic specification for the treebank.