Daniel Swanson


2022

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A Universal Dependencies Treebank of Ancient Hebrew
Daniel Swanson | Francis Tyers
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

In this paper we present the initial construction of a Universal Dependencies treebank with morphological annotations of Ancient Hebrew containing portions of the Hebrew Scriptures (1579 sentences, 27K tokens) for use in comparative study with ancient translations and for analysis of the development of Hebrew syntax. We construct this treebank by applying a rule-based parser (300 rules) to an existing morphologically-annotated corpus with minimal constituency structure and manually verifying the output and present the results of this semi-automated annotation process and some of the annotation decisions made in the process of applying the UD guidelines to a new language.

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A Free/Open-Source Morphological Transducer for Western Armenian
Hossep Dolatian | Daniel Swanson | Jonathan Washington
Proceedings of the Workshop on Processing Language Variation: Digital Armenian (DigitAm) within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

We present a free/open-source morphological transducer for Western Armenian, an endangered and low-resource Indo-European language. The transducer has virtually complete coverage of the language’s inflectional morphology. We built the lexicon by scraping online dictionaries. As of submission, the transducer has a lexicon of 75K words. It has over 90% naive coverage on different Western Armenian corpora, and high precision.

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Handling Stress in Finite-State Morphological Analyzers for Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew
Daniel Swanson | Francis Tyers
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages

Modeling stress placement has historically been a challenge for computational morphological analysis, especially in finite-state systems because lexically conditioned stress cannot be modeled using only rewrite rules on the phonological form of a word. However, these phenomena can be modeled fairly easily if the lexicon’s internal representation is allowed to contain more information than the pure phonological form. In this paper we describe the stress systems of Ancient Greek and Ancient Hebrew and we present two prototype finite-state morphological analyzers, one for each language, which successfully implement these stress systems by inserting a small number of control characters into the phonological form, thus conclusively refuting the claim that finite-state systems are not powerful enough to model such stress systems and arguing in favor of the continued relevance of finite-state systems as an appropriate tool for modeling the morphology of historical languages.