Building minority dependency treebanks, dictionaries and computational grammars at the same time—an experiment in Karelian treebanking

Abstract

Building a treebank from scratch can easily be an elaborate, highly time consuming task, especially when working with a minority language with moderately complex morphology and no existing resources. It is also then typically true that language experts and informants with suitable skill sets are a very scarce resource. In this experiment I have attempted to work in parallel on building NLP resources while gathering and annotating the treebank. In particular, I aim to build a decent coverage morphologically annotated lexicon suitable for rule-based morphological analysis as well as accompanying rules for basic morphosyntactic analysis. I propose here a workflow, that I have found useful in avoiding redoing same work with related NLP resource construction.