Improvements in Parsing the Index Thomisticus Treebank. Revision, Combination and a Feature Model for Medieval Latin

Marco Passarotti, Felice Dell’Orletta


Abstract
The creation of language resources for less-resourced languages like the historical ones benefits from the exploitation of language-independent tools and methods developed over the years by many projects for modern languages. Along these lines, a number of treebanks for historical languages started recently to arise, including treebanks for Latin. Among the Latin treebanks, the Index Thomisticus Treebank is a 68,000 token dependency treebank based on the Index Thomisticus by Roberto Busa SJ, which contains the opera omnia of Thomas Aquinas (118 texts) as well as 61 texts by other authors related to Thomas, for a total of approximately 11 million tokens. In this paper, we describe a number of modifications that we applied to the dependency parser DeSR, in order to improve the parsing accuracy rates on the Index Thomisticus Treebank. First, we adapted the parser to the specific processing of Medieval Latin, defining an ad-hoc configuration of its features. Then, in order to improve the accuracy rates provided by DeSR, we applied a revision parsing method and we combined the outputs produced by different algorithms. This allowed us to improve accuracy rates substantially, reaching results that are well beyond the state of the art of parsing for Latin.
Anthology ID:
L10-1118
Volume:
Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)
Month:
May
Year:
2010
Address:
Valletta, Malta
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Mike Rosner, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/178_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marco Passarotti and Felice Dell’Orletta. 2010. Improvements in Parsing the Index Thomisticus Treebank. Revision, Combination and a Feature Model for Medieval Latin. In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10), Valletta, Malta. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Improvements in Parsing the Index Thomisticus Treebank. Revision, Combination and a Feature Model for Medieval Latin (Passarotti & Dell’Orletta, LREC 2010)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2010/pdf/178_Paper.pdf