Converting the parallel treebank ParTUT in Universal Stanford Dependencies
Authors: Manuela Sanguinetti, Cristina Bosco (Università di Torino, 2014)
Topic: Syntax and Dependency Treebanks

Abstract
Assuming the increased need of language resources encoded with shared representation formats, the paper de-scribes a project for the conversion of the multilingual parallel treebank ParTUT in the de facto standard of the Stanford Dependencies (SD) representation. More specifically, it reports the conversion pro-cess, currently implemented as a proto-type, into the Universal SD format, more oriented to a cross-linguistic perspective and, therefore, more suitable for the pur-pose of our resource.

Introduction
1 Introduction The increasing need to use language resources for the development and training of automatic systems goes hand in hand with the opportunity to make such resources available and accessible. This op-portunity, however, is often precluded by the use of different formats for encoding linguistic con-tent. Such differences may be dictated by sev-eral factors that, in the specific case of syntacti-cally annotated corpora, or treebanks, may include the choice of constituency vs dependency-based paradigm, the specific morphological and syntac-tical features of the language at issue, or the end use the resource has been designed for. This vari-ety of formats makes it more difficult the reuse of these resources in different contexts. In the case of parsing, and of treebanks, a few steps towards the spread of formats that could be easily shared by the community has led, also thanks to the efforts devoted to the organization of evaluation campaigns, to the use of what have then become de facto standards. This is the case, for example, of the Penn Treebank format for con-stituency paradigms (Mitchell et al., 1993). Within the framework of dependency-based rep-resentations, a new format has recently gained in-creasing success, i.e. that of the Stanford Typed Dependencies. The emergence of this format is attested by several projects on the conversion and harmonization of treebanks into this representa-tion format (Bosco et al., 2013; Haverinen et al., 2013; McDonald et al., 2013; Tsarfaty, 2013; Rosa et al., 2014). The project described in this paper is part of these ones and concerns in particular the conversion into the Stanford Dependencies of a multilingual parallel treebank for Italian, English and French called ParTUT. The next section will provide a brief description of ParTUT and its native format, along with that of the Universal Stanford Dependencies, while Section 3 will be devoted to the description of the conversion process, with some observations on its implications in the future development of ParTUT.

Conclusion
In this paper, we briefly described the ongoing project of conversion of a multilingual parallel treebank from its native representation format, i.e. TUT, into the Universal Stanford Dependencies. The main advantages of such attempt lie in the opportunity to release the parallel resource in a widely recognized annotation format that opens its usability to a number of NLP tasks, and in a resulting representation of parallel syntactic structures that are more uniform and, therefore, easier to put in correspondence. Conversion, however, is not a straightforward process, and a number of issues are yet to be tackled in order to obtain a converted version that is fully compliant with the target format. The next steps of this work will focus in particular on such issues.