Old French Dependency Parsing: Results of Two Parsers Analysed from a Linguistic Point of View

Abstract

The treatment of medieval texts is a particular challenge for parsers. I compare how two dependency parsers, one graph-based, the other transition-based, perform on Old French, facing some typical problems of medieval texts: graphical variation, relatively free word order, and syntactic variation of several parameters over a diachronic period of about 300 years. Both parsers were trained and evaluated on the ``Syntactic Reference Corpus of Medieval French'' (SRCMF), a manually annotated dependency treebank. I discuss the relation between types of parsers and types of language, as well as the differences of the analyses from a linguistic point of view.

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Reproductions