Treebank of Chinese Bible Translations

This paper reports on a treebanking project where eight different modern Chinese translations of the Bible are syntactically analyzed. The trees are created through dynamic treebanking which uses a parser to produce the trees. The trees have been going through manual checking, but corrections are made not by editing the tree files but by re-generating the trees with an updated grammar and dictionary. The accuracy of the treebank is high due to the fact that the grammar and dictionary are optimized for this specific domain. The tree structures essentially follow the guidelines of the Penn Chinese Treebank. The total number of characters covered by the treebank is 7,872,420 characters. The data has been used in Bible translation and Bible search. It should also prove useful in the computational study of the Chinese language in general.