Enhancements to the BOUN Treebank Reflecting the Agglutinative Nature of Turkish

TL;DR

This paper improves the BOUN Treebank for Turkish by introducing new annotation conventions to better represent linguistic features like null morphemes and derivational processes, enhancing its utility for NLP tasks.

Contribution

It proposes linguistically motivated annotation conventions for Turkish in the BOUN Treebank within the UD framework, addressing key linguistic phenomena.

Findings

Enhanced the treebank's representational capacity for Turkish morphology

Improved dependency parsing performance with the re-annotated treebank

Introduced an updated BoAT Tool for better annotation and analysis

Abstract

In this study, we aim to offer linguistically motivated solutions to resolve the issues of the lack of representation of null morphemes, highly productive derivational processes, and syncretic morphemes of Turkish in the BOUN Treebank without diverging from the Universal Dependencies framework. In order to tackle these issues, new annotation conventions were introduced by splitting certain lemmas and employing the MISC (miscellaneous) tab in the UD framework to denote derivation. Representational capabilities of the re-annotated treebank were tested on a LSTM-based dependency parser and an updated version of the BoAT Tool is introduced.