In this paper we apply a set of rules to identify the root of a dependency tree, following the Universal Dependencies formalism and starting from the constituency annotation of the York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose (YCOE). This rule-based root-identification task represents the first step towards a rule-based automatic conversion of this valuable resource into the UD format. After presenting Old English and the annotated resources available for this language, we describe the different rules we applied and then we discuss the results and the errors.

In this paper we test the parsing performances of a multilingual parser on Old English data using different sets of languages, alone and combined with the target language, to train the models. We compare the results obtained by the models and we analyze more in deep the annotation of some peculiar syntactic constructions of the target language, providing plausible linguistic explanations of the errors made even by the best performing models.