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The Annotation Guidelines of the Latin Dependency Treebank and Index Thomisticus Treebank: the Treatment of some specific Syntactic Constructions in Latin

Summary

The paper describes shared syntactic annotation guidelines for the first two Latin treebanks. These are the Latin Dependency Treebank (LDT) of the Perseus Project, built on classical texts, and the Index Thomisticus Treebank (IT-TB), built on the works of Thomas Aquinas. Both projects work within the framework of dependency grammar. This framework suits languages with fairly free word order, where the parts of a single phrase are often separated by other words. No ready-made Latin guidelines existed before. The authors therefore took the scheme of the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT), created for Czech, as a basis and adapted it to Latin following Pinkster's grammar. The paper shows how to annotate typically Latin constructions: the ablative absolute, the accusative + infinitive, the gerund and gerundive, and predicative complements. The shared manual makes it possible to combine corpora separated by roughly thirteen centuries. This allows mutual checking of annotation consistency, diachronic study of syntax, and training statistical dependency parsers on a larger amount of data. The projects differ only in the annotation of ellipsis, but the LDT format can always be converted to the IT-TB format, so the data remain compatible.

Key points

  • Corpus size. LDT contains 30,457 words and 1,650 sentences. These are texts by Cicero, Caesar, Sallust and Virgil (1st century BC) and Jerome (4th–5th centuries). IT-TB contains 30,145 words and 1,352 sentences from the works of Thomas Aquinas (13th century).
  • Tag set. The tags are inherited from PDT: PRED, SBJ, OBJ, ATR, ADV, PNOM, COORD, APOS, the Aux* group and ExD. The suffixes _Co, _Ap and _Pa mark coordination, apposition and parenthetical constructions. Unlike PDT, a separate tag OCOMP is introduced for the object complement. ATV/AtvV were retained for predicative complements as treated by Pinkster.
  • Ablative absolute. The construction is treated as an embedded predication functioning as an adverbial. The participle is the head and depends on the main verb via ADV, while the noun is its SBJ. If there is no participle, the noun receives ADV and the word dependent on it receives ATV.
  • Accusative + infinitive, gerund and gerundive. In the accusative + infinitive construction, the head of the clause is the infinitive, which usually depends via OBJ on a verb of speaking. The accusative subject is nevertheless tagged SBJ. The gerund is annotated as an ordinary noun. The gerundive receives ATR if it can be removed without changing the meaning; otherwise it becomes the head of the construction. The noun accompanying such a gerundive is considered its subject, because the form is passive.
  • Ellipsis. This is the only difference between the projects. LDT preserves the deep structure of the sentence by means of composite tags. IT-TB, like PDT, attaches the "orphaned" member to the head via ExD. The shape of the trees remains the same.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Dependency parsing · Treebanks

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{bamman2008annotation,
  title = {{The Annotation Guidelines of the Latin Dependency Treebank and Index Thomisticus Treebank: the Treatment of some specific Syntactic Constructions in Latin}},
  author = {Bamman, David and Passarotti, Marco and Busa, Roberto and Crane, Gregory},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)},
  year = {2008},
  doi = {10.63317/48usu88nq957},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/48usu88nq957}
}

References

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