U niversal D ependencies for M anx G aelic (2020)

Abstract: Manx Gaelic is one of the three Q-Celtic languages, along with Irish and Scottish Gaelic. We present a new dependency treebank for Manx consisting of 291 sentences and about 6000 tokens, annotated according to the Universal Dependency (UD) guidelines. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first annotated corpus of any kind for Manx. Our annotations generally follow the conventions established by the existing UD treebanks for Irish and Scottish Gaelic, although we highlight some areas where the grammar of Manx diverges, requiring new analyses. We use 10-fold cross validation to evaluate the accuracy of dependency parsers trained on the corpus, and compare these results with delexicalised models transferred from Irish and Scottish Gaelic.

## introduction manx gaelic, spoken primarily on the isle of man, is one of the three q-celtic (or goidelic) languages, along with irish and scottish gaelic. although the language fell out of widespread use during the 19th and 20th centuries, it has seen a vibrant revitalization movement in recent years. the number of speakers is now growing, thanks in part to a manx-language primary school on the island. the language also has a strong online presence relative to the size of the community. several manx dictionaries were published in the 19th and 20th centuries, and a number of these have been digitized in recent years and published online. 1 the full text of the bible, originally published in the 18th century, is also available and provides an easily-accessible source of parallel text. 2 in terms of spoken language, the irish folklore commission recorded fluent speakers on the isle of man in 1948, and those recordings are now available digitally as well. 3 outside of these corpus resources, very little advanced language technology exists for manx. the lack of a lemmatizer and part-of-speech tagger makes it more difficult for language learners and linguistic researchers to search corpora of manx texts. these difficulties are compounded by spelling variations in the traditional texts as well as the system of initial mutations. with these challenges in mind, we set out to lay the foundation for manx language technology by developing a lemmatizer, tagger, and dependency parser. the universal dependencies framework @xcite was ideal for our purposes, offering a unified annotation scheme which opens up the possibility of cross-lingual analysis, as well as a rich ecosystem of computational tools. in §2, we present our new treebank for manx, annotated according to the universal dependencies (v2) guidelines and released under an open source license. there are now ud treebanks for five of the six celtic languages, with manx joining irish @xcite , breton @xcite , scottish gaelic @xcite , and welsh ( heinecke and tyers, 2019 )only cornish remains to be done. the manx treebank is relatively small, consisting of 291 sentences and about 6000 tokens, and was annotated entirely by hand. because of the close linguistic relationship between manx and its sister languages of irish and scottish gaelic, we were able to refer to the existing ta x çhyndaa gys yn scaailan is x turning to the screen verb propn noun adp det noun root nsubj xcomp case det obl (a) manx tha x a' tionndadh chun an sgàilein is x asp turning to the screen verb propn part noun adp det noun root nsubj case xcomp case det obl (b) scottish gaelic casann x i dtreo an scáileáin turns x in direction the screen verb propn adp noun det noun root nsubj case fixed det obl (c) irish ud treebanks for these languages while constructing the corpus. that said, the grammar of manx does differ in a few important ways, and we discuss some of these divergent analyses in §3. in §4, we evaluate the accuracy of several dependency parsing models on the manx corpus. first, we trained udpipe models using the corpus itself via 10-fold cross validation, achieving labeled accuracy scores of 65.20 on plain text input, and 76.29 when the parser was given access to the gold pos tags. we then evaluated the performance of delexicalized models trained on the irish and scottish gaelic treebanks on the manx corpus but were unable to achieve comparable results despite the close linguistic relationships. other approaches to cross-lingual parsing such as annotation projection might give better results in the future, but these would depend on the development of machine translation engines and large parallel corpora between the gaelic languages. ## corpus development and annotation the grammar of manx is very close to both irish and scottish gaelic, sharing features such as vso word order, initial consonant mutations, inflected prepositions, and extensive use of the verbal noun. in places where irish and scottish gaelic diverge, manx is typically more closely allied with scottish gaelic, e.g. in the use of a periphrastic construction involving the verbal noun to express the present tense; see figure 1 . for reasons of space we make no attempt to survey the grammar here, referring the interested reader to @xcite for a general overview. in terms of universal dependencies per se, we refer to @xcite and @xcite , as well as the detailed guidelines for those languages on the universal dependencies web site. 4 the sentences in the treebank were taken from a web-crawled corpus of manx consisting of more than eight million words of text. this corpus contains virtually all non-trivial manx language texts on the open web, and therefore the treebank presented here is as close as possible to a "random sample" of manx on the web. as such, the bible is heavily represented, but there are also many sentences from modern sources: the manx wikipedia, news stories from manx radio, blog posts, etc. 5 the web corpus was segmented by sentences and shuffled; then, 300 random sentences were chosen for annotation (nine of these require further analysis and did not make it into the initial release of the ta x gra dy vel drogh-reirey er chostal eeckeyderyn-keesh keead thousane punt is x saying that is mismanagement after costing taxpayers 100 thousand pound verb propn noun part verb noun adp noun noun num num noun root nsubj xcomp mark ccomp nsubj case xcomp iobj nummod nummod obj "x says that mismanagement has cost taxpayers one hundred thousand pounds" figure 3 : example of an indirect object in manx. in irish and scottish gaelic, where there are no indirect objects, verbs meaning "to cost" would express this argument via an oblique pp. ## comparison with irish and scottish gaelic in this section we highlight some differences between the manx treebank and the irish and scottish gaelic treebanks. all of the celtic languages have so-called "inflected prepositions," e.g. manx lhiam "with me" (ir. liom, sc.g leam), manx lhiat "with you" (ir. and sc.g. leat), etc. these are treated as single tokens in the irish and scottish treebanks, while we have instead followed the breton @xcite and welsh @xcite treebanks by decomposing these into their constituent preposition and pronoun. figure 2 shows the parse for sentence aa_239 from the treebank: s'treisht lhiam dy vel shiu braew ("i hope that you are well"), in which the word lhiam has been decomposed into lesh "with" plus mee "me". treating inflected prepositions in this way helps address ambiguities in some third person singular cases (e.g. lesh is also the inflected form meaning "with him"), and we hope it also makes it easier to learn syntactic generalizations since these prepositions behave like standard prepositional phrases. indirect objects do not occur in irish or scottish gaelic, and, to the best of our knowledge, do not appear in traditional manx texts either. there are examples of indirect objects in revived manx, however, presumably under the influence of english. see figure 3 , which is a simplified version of sentence aa_093 in the treebank. verbal nouns play an important role in all of the celtic languages but particularly so in manx. we follow the lead of irish, scottish gaelic, and welsh by tagging verbal nouns as noun and treating them syntactically as xcomp of the surrounding verb (in contrast with the breton treebank which treats them as full-fledged verbs). objects can come before or after the verbal noun in all three gaelic languages, although there is a greater tendency for them to follow the verbal noun in manx. an unusual feature of manx is the frequency with which verbal nouns are used together with the verb jean ("do", ir. déan, sc.g. dèan) to express past or future tense, where the other gaelic languages would commonly use an inflected form of the verb itself. one sees this construction even with the verbal noun jannoo corresponding to jean itself, as in the first example in figure 4 . one consequence of this is a much higher overall frequency for the lemmas jean and jannoo in the manx treebank (occurring once out of every 64 tokens on average) than for the corresponding lemmas in irish or scottish gaelic (occurring once per 197 and 224 tokens, respectively). ## parsing experiments all of the experiments in this section make use of the latest version foot_2 of udpipe @xcite with the default settings (hidden layer size of 200 and the projective parsing algorithm). we began by evaluating the udpipe lemmatizer, pos tagger, and parser via 10-fold cross validation on the manx treebank itself. in each iteration, 261 sentences were used for training and 30 sentences were used for testing; the same splits were preserved across the experiments. in the first set of experiments we evaluated on plain text input, which is to say we made no use of the gold standard tokens, lemmas, or pos tags. the f 1 scores and standard deviations over the ten splits are presented in