Resources for Turkish Dependency Parsing: Introducing the BOUN Treebank and the BoAT Annotation Tool
This provides a new dataset and tool for Turkish NLP, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Universal Dependencies frameworks.
The authors tackled the lack of resources for Turkish dependency parsing by introducing the BOUN Treebank, the largest Turkish treebank with 9,761 sentences, and the BoAT annotation tool, leading to improved parsing performance through unified annotation.
In this paper, we introduce the resources that we developed for Turkish dependency parsing, which include a novel manually annotated treebank (BOUN Treebank), along with the guidelines we adopted, and a new annotation tool (BoAT). The manual annotation process we employed was shaped and implemented by a team of four linguists and five Natural Language Processing (NLP) specialists. Decisions regarding the annotation of the BOUN Treebank were made in line with the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework as well as our recent efforts for unifying the Turkish UD treebanks through manual re-annotation. To the best of our knowledge, BOUN Treebank is the largest Turkish treebank. It contains a total of 9,761 sentences from various topics including biographical texts, national newspapers, instructional texts, popular culture articles, and essays. In addition, we report the parsing results of a state-of-the-art dependency parser obtained over the BOUN Treebank as well as two other treebanks in Turkish. Our results demonstrate that the unification of the Turkish annotation scheme and the introduction of a more comprehensive treebank lead to improved performance with regard to dependency parsing.