Automatically Building a Latin Treebank

大量句法分析的句子（称为树库）已被证明对语言学和计算机科学中的许多问题非常有用，可以研究语言的句法，同时也为自动翻译等任务提供了基础。 然而，建立这样的树库是一项时间和劳动密集型的任务，因为它需要熟练的注释者手工标记每个句子。 这一过程可以通过使用计算机程序来分配句法结构而部分自动化，但拉丁语的这种自动化的潜力尚不清楚，因为其自由的词序和高水平的屈折变化阻碍了准确的自动分析。 可能仍然需要高水平的手动标记。 该项目将进行一项可行性研究，以确定建立一个数百万字的拉丁文树库所需的资源。我们将开发一个初步的拉丁语句法分析器，使用它来自动化一小部分古典文本（凯撒，维吉尔，西塞罗和杰罗姆的摘录）的注释过程，然后手动纠正结果。 这项研究的直接意义是对创建一个研究较少的语言树库所涉及的成本进行准确估计，并且是建立一个真正有价值的语法解析拉丁语句子的数百万单词集合的必要的第一步。

Large collections of syntactically parsed sentences (known as treebanks) have proven to be useful for a number of problems in linguistics and computer science, enabling research into the syntax of a language while also providing the cornerstone for such tasks as automatic translation. Building such treebanks, however, is a time- and labor-intensive task since it requires skilled annotators to tag each sentence by hand. This process can be partially automated with the use of computer programs to assign syntactic structure, but the potential for this kind of automation for Latin is unclear, since its free word order and high level of inflection resist accurate automatic analysis. A high level of manual tagging may still be necessary. This project will conduct a feasibility study to determine the resources required to build a multimillion-word Latin treebank. We will develop a preliminary Latin syntactic parser, use it to automate part of the annotation process for a small group of Classical texts (excerpts from Caesar, Vergil, Cicero and Jerome), and then manually correct the results. The immediate significance of this study is an accurate estimate of the costs involved in creating a treebank of a lesser-studied language, and is the necessary first step in building a truly valuable multimillion-word collection of syntactically parsed Latin sentences.