Morphological Features of the Irish Universal Dependencies Treebank

The Universal Dependencies Project1 (Nivre, [9]; Nivre et al., [10]) is an ongoing effort towards creating a set of harmonised dependency treebanks that are annotated and structured according to universal guidelines. This paper reports on the addition of morphological features to the Irish Universal Dependencies Treebank (IUDT). Our feature set subscribes to the feature inventory of the UD Project and has been mapped from Irish morpho-syntactic tags – the output of a Finite State Morphological Analyser for Irish (Uí Dhonnchadha and van Genabith [16]). Irish, a Celtic language, has some relatively unusual morphological features that require language-specific labels not covered by the universal feature set. In this paper, we summarise the Irish-specific features that we have added to this set by explaining the linguistic properties that they each describe. We also report on the first parsing experiments using the IUDT by assessing the effect that the inclusion of morphological features has on parsing accuracy.