Irish treebanking and parsing: a preliminary evaluation

Language resources are essential for linguistic research and the development of NLP applications. Low-density languages, such as Irish, therefore lack significant research in this area. This paper describes the early stages in the development of new language resources for Irish – namely the first Irish dependency treebank and the first Irish statistical dependency parser. We present the methodology behind building our new treebank and the steps we take to leverage upon the few existing resources. We discuss language-specific choices made when defining our dependency labelling scheme, and describe interesting Irish language characteristics such as prepositional attachment, copula and clefting. We manually develop a small treebank of 300 sentences based on an existing POS-tagged corpus and report an inter-annotator agreement of 0.7902. We train MaltParser to achieve preliminary parsing results for Irish and describe a bootstrapping approach for further stages of development.