Towards a Slovene Dependency Treebank

The paper presents the initial release of the Slovene Dependency Treebank, currently containing 2000 sentences or 30.000 words. Our approach to annotation is based on the Prague Dependency Treebank, which serves as an excellent model due to the similarity of the languages, the existence of a detailed annotation guide and an annotation editor. The initial treebank contains a portion of the MULTEXT-East parallel word-level annotated corpus, namely the first part of the Slovene translation of Orwell’s “1984”. This corpus was first parsed automatically, to arrive at the initial analytic level dependency trees. These were then hand corrected using the tree editor TrEd; simultaneously, the Czech annotation manual was modified for Slovene. The current version is available in XML/TEI, as well as derived formats, and has been used in a comparative evaluation using the MALT parser, and as one of the languages present in the CoNLL-X shared task on dependency parsing. The paper also discusses further work, in the first instance the composition of the corpus to be annotated next.