UD - ETCSUX : Toward a Better Understanding of S umerian Syntax (2024)

Abstract: Beginning with the discovery of the cuneiform writing system in 1835, there have been numerous grammars published illustrating the complexities of the Sumerian language. However, the one thing they have in common is their omission of dependency rules for syntax in Sumerian linguistics. For this reason we are working toward a better understanding of Sumerian syntax, by means of dependency-grammar in the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework. Therefore, in this study we articulate the methods and engineering techniques that can address the hardships in annotating dependency relationships in the Sumerian texts in transliteration from the Electronic Text Corpora of Sumerian (ETCSUX). Our code can be found at https://github.com/ancient-world-citation-analysis/UD-ETCSUX.

## introduction the sumerian language has been studied academically by philologists since henry rawlinson's discovery of the cuneiform writing system in 1835 @xcite . since then, there have been numerous grammars published illustrating the complexities of the sumerian language, including: epigraphy, orthography, phonology, morphology, and semantics. while not all of these grammars are in agreement, the one thing they have in common is their general lack of rules for dependencygrammar. this is because sumerian is a highly inflected language with post-position particles for cases, numbers, and persons, and an agglutinative verbal system that reflects these same features for a given clause or sentence in the verbal chain, thereby reducing the need for complex syntax rules. for this reason, we are working toward a better understanding of sumerian syntax, by means of dependency-grammar in the universal dependencies (ud) framework @xcite , in order to model the many different dependencies of a polysemous sentence and illustrate the results using ud treebanks. this paper is meant to serve as the first step in motivating the much-needed collaboration of computational linguists and sumerologists in the development of open-source tools for the sumerian language, and the cuneiform writing system. our contribution is summarized as follows: ## ud-etcsux dataset in this section, we delineate the methodology of our dependency dataset, ud-etcsux. initially, we extracted sumerian transliterations along with their english equivalents from the etcsri @xcite and etcsl @xcite datasets. subsequently, we utilized the spacy framework @xcite to perform dependency tagging on the english translations. using the dependency tags derived from the universal dependencies (ud) and the english translations, we manually transferred the ud labels from the english texts to the corresponding sumerian transliterations, guided by the lemmatization and english gloss words provided in etcsri and etcsl. this methodology enables annotators with limited expertise in sumerian to initiate the annotation of basic structures in the language. with ud labels directly attached to sumerian transliterations, this process facilitates the later migration of the labeled data into a ud-compatible format. we present an example from ud-etcsux in we selected 60 labeled sumerian transliterations and used a trained embedding model to find the most semantically similar words in the corpus, replacing the original transliterations with new words of similar meaning. this process generated 60 new transliterations, with an example presented in ## sumerian dependency parser in this section, we present the complete workflow that forms our dependency parser. ## experiments we evaluated both pmi and fasttext embedding methods trained on lemmas and transliterations, respectively. for each 10-fold cross-validation, we report the average unlabeled attachment score (uas) @xcite and labeled attachment score (las) @xcite across the folds. the uas measures the parser's ability to identify the sentence structure, focusing on the correctness of the head assignments. in contrast, the las evaluates the parser's performance on both dependency tags and sentence structure, assessing both head assignments and the correct labeling of dependency relations. both scores are reported as percentage accuracy, ranging from 0 to 100, with 100 being complete correctness. the detailed scores are presented in ## qualitative evaluation we present two examples to illustrate the performance of our dependency parser. ## future directions we plan to incorporate additional feedback from language experts and continuously expand and enhance the quality of ud-etcsux, with the ultimate goal of publishing it in the universal dependency treebank. additionally, we will conduct inter-annotator agreement studies in future work to ensure the reliability and consistency of our annotations. furthermore, we have identified two issues that require targeted solutions in future research. ## conclusion in this work, we presented ud-etcsux, a concise dataset for sumerian dependency parsing. additionally, we introduced tools to enhance parsing accuracy, such as compound verb detection and data augmentation techniques. our dependency parsing analysis compared various embedding methods and identified areas for future improvement. we hope our contributions will prove valuable and inspire language experts to further advance the understanding of sumerian syntax.