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Universalising Latin Universal Dependencies: a harmonisation of Latin treebanks in UD

Publication at Faculty of Mathematics and Physics |
2023

Abstract

This paper presents the harmonisation process carried out on the five treebanks available for Latin in Universal Dependencies, with the aim of eliminating the discrepancies in their annotation styles. Indeed, this is the first issue to be addressed when parsing Latin, as significant drops in parsing accuracy on different Latin treebanks have been repeatedly observed.

Latin syntactic variability surely accounts for this, but parsing results are as well affected by divergent annotation choices. By analysing where annotations differ, we propose a Python-based alignment of the five UD treebanks.

Consequently, the impact of annotation choices on accuracy scores is assessed by performing parsing experiments with UDPipe and Stanza.