As the interest of the NLP community grows to develop several treebanks also for languages other than English, we observe efforts towards evaluating the impact of different annotation strategies used to represent particular languages or with reference to particular tasks. This paper contributes to the debate on the influence of resources used for the training and development on the performance of parsing systems. It presents a comparative analysis of the results achieved by three different dependency parsers developed and tested with respect to two treebanks for the Italian language, namely TUT and ISST--TANL, which differ significantly at the level of both corpus composition and adopted dependency representations.

This paper presents a freely available evaluation tool for dependency parsing: MaltEval (http://w3.msi.vxu.se/users/jni/malteval). It is flexible and extensible, and provides functionality for both quantitative evaluation and visualization of dependency structure. The quantitative evaluation is compatible with other standard evaluation software for dependency structure which does not produce visualization of dependency structure, and can output more details as well as new types of evaluation metrics. In addition, MaltEval has generic support for confusion matrices. It can also produce statistical significance tests when more than one parsed file is specified. The visualization module also has the ability to highlight discrepancies between the gold-standard files and the parsed files, and it comes with an easy to use GUI functionality to search in the dependency structure of the input files.

We introduce MaltParser, a data-driven parser generator for dependency parsing. Given a treebank in dependency format, MaltParser can be used to induce a parser for the language of the treebank. MaltParser supports several parsing algorithms and learning algorithms, and allows user-defined feature models, consisting of arbitrary combinations of lexical features, part-of-speech features and dependency features. MaltParser is freely available for research and educational purposes and has been evaluated empirically on Swedish, English, Czech, Danish and Bulgarian.

We introduce Talbanken05, a Swedish treebank based on a syntactically annotated corpus from the 1970s, Talbanken76, converted to modern formats. The treebank is available in three different formats, besides the original one: two versions of phrase structure annotation and one dependency-based annotation, all of which are encoded in XML. In this paper, we describe the conversion process and exemplify the available formats. The treebank is freely available for research and educational purposes.