From YCOE to UD: Rule-based Root Identification in Old English

What it is about

The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English (YCOE) is a constituency treebank, and the paper takes the first step towards converting it into UD by identifying the root of each tree with rules over the YCOE tags. The rules cover main clauses (IP-MAT), questions (CP-QUE), verbs, the verbs "have", "be" and modals, and copular versus infinitival "be". On a sample of 390 sentences the root is correct in 349, with 24 wrong tokens and 17 missing roots. Most missing roots are sentences in Latin, which YCOE tags as FW whatever their part of speech, and most wrong roots come from confusing copular and existential "be", where only the wider context decides. Negated tags such as NEG+BEDI were also missed, because adding them to the copula rule risked clashing with earlier rules.

Ideas

• I1. Root gate: extend the one-root gate in tools/treeagree so that a sentence with no root candidate from the Rust converter is flagged; count such sentences per bank on EWT and GUM (test only) before any new rule is written.
• I2. Copula versus existential "be": in en/src/ud.rs, measure the confusions between cop, root and expl on EWT dev with en ud-eval, to see how often the same error as the paper's occurs in English.
• I3. Negated copulas: in en/src/convert.rs, handle "not" and "n't" attached to a "be" form as one copular unit; measure root errors on a list of 100 of our own negated copular sentences.

For Mova

The converter from constituency to UD is en/src/convert.rs, the root and copula logic is in en/src/ud.rs, and the root gate is in tools/treeagree. The chapter is 21. The simple clause for clause roots and 13. Verbs for "be". Measure first the cop and root confusions on EWT dev, the English counterpart of the paper's main error.

Topics: Universal Dependencies

Cite

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

@inproceedings{villa2024ycoe,
  title = {{From YCOE to UD: Rule-based Root Identification in Old English}},
  author = {Villa, Luca Brigada and Giarda, Martina},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages (LT4HALA) @ LREC-COLING-2024},
  year = {2024},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2024.lt4hala-1.3/}
}

References

19 references, 4 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Javier Arista. 2022a. Old english universal dependencies: Categories, functions and specific fields. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 3: ICAART,, pages 945–951. INSTICC, SciTePress. find
2. Javier Arista. 2022b. Toward the morpho-syntactic annotation of an old english corpus with universal dependencies. Revista de Linguistica y Lenguas Aplicadas, 17:85–97. find
3. Þórunn Arnardóttir, Hinrik Hafsteinsson, Einar Freyr Sigurðsson, Kristín Bjarnadóttir, Anton Karl Ingason, Hildur Jónsdóttir, and Steinþór Steingrímsson. 2020. A Universal Dependencies conversion pipeline for a Penn-format constituency treebank. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2020), pages 16–25, Barcelona, Spain (Online). Association for Computational Linguistics. find
4. Luca Brigada Villa and Martina Giarda. 2023. Using modern languages to parse ancient ones: a test on Old English. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP, pages 30– 41, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics. find our card
5. Sabine Buchholz and Erwin Marsi. 2006. CoNLL-X shared task on multilingual dependency parsing. In Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-X), pages 149–164, New York City. Association for Computational Linguistics. find our card
6. James E. Cross and Thomas D. Hill. 1982. The Prose Solomon and Saturn and Adrian and Ritheus. University of Toronto Press, Toronto. find
7. Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Christopher D. Manning, Joakim Nivre, and Daniel Zeman. 2021. Universal Dependencies. Computational Linguistics, 47(2):255–308. find our card
8. Olga Fischer, Ans van Kemenade, Willem Koopman, and Wim van der Wurff. 2001. The Syntax of Early English. Cambridge Syntax Guides. Cambridge University Press. find
9. Anton Karl Ingason, Hrafn Loftsson, Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, Einar Freyr Sigurðsson, and Joel C. Wallenberg. 2014. Rapid deployment of phrase structure parsing for related languages: A case study of Insular Scandinavian. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’14), pages 91– 95, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). find
10. Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson. 2012. A guide to Old English. Eighth edition. John Wiley & Sons, Malden, Oxford. find
11. Rafał Molencki. 2017. Syntax. In Laurel J. Brinton and Alexander Bergs, editors, The History of English. Old English, volume 2, chapter 5, pages 100–124. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, Boston. find
12. Susan Pintzuk and Ann Taylor. 2006. The Loss of OV Order in the History of English, chapter 11. John Wiley Sons, Ltd. find
13. John C. Pope. 1968. Homilies of Ælfric: a Supplementary Collection. Early English Society, Oxford University Press, London. find
14. Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, Anton Karl Ingason, Einar Freyr Sigurðsson, and Joel Wallenberg. 2012. The Icelandic parsed historical corpus (IcePaHC). In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’12), pages 1977–1984, Istanbul, Turkey. European Language Resources Association (ELRA). find our card
15. Ferdinand von Mengden. 2017a. Morphology. In Laurel J. Brinton and Alexander Bergs, editors, The History of English. Old English, volume 2, chapter 5, pages 73–99. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, Boston. find
16. Ferdinand von Mengden. 2017b. Old english: Overview. In Laurel J. Brinton and Alexander Bergs, editors, The History of English. Old English, volume 2, chapter 3, pages 32–49. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin, Boston. find
17. Language Resource References Kroch, Anthony and Taylor, Ann. 2000. Penn Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English. Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania., second. [link]. find
18. Pintzuk, Susan and Plug, Leendert. 2002. The York-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Poetry (YCOEP). Department of Linguistics, University of York. [link]. find
19. Taylor, Ann and Warner, Anthony and Pintzuk, Susan and Beths, Frank. 2003. The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE). Department of Linguistics, University of York. [link]. find

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ud-2024-villa-ycoe-ud-rule-based-root/