The LIA Treebank of Spoken Norwegian Dialects

The LIA Treebank of Spoken Norwegian Dialects Lilja Øvrelid†, Andre K˚asen †‡, Kristin Hagen‡, Anders Nøklestad‡, Per Erik Solberg∗ and Janne Bondi Johannessen‡ † Department of Informatics, University of Oslo ‡ Department of Linguistics and Scandinavian Studies, University of Oslo ∗ Department of Philosophy, Classics, History of Arts and Ideas, University of Oslo {liljao,andrekaa}@ifi.uio.no, {kristin.hagen,j.b.johannessen, anders.noklestad}@iln.uio.no, p.e.solberg@ifikk.uio.no Abstract This article presents the LIA treebank of transcribed spoken Norwegian dialects. It consists of dialect recordings made in the period between 1950–1990, which have been digitised, transcribed, and subsequently annotated with morphological and dependency-style syntactic analysis as part of the LIA (Language Infrastructure made Accessible) project at the University of Oslo. In this article, we describe the LIA material of dialect recordings and its transcription, transliteration and further morphosyntactic annotation. We focus in particular on the extension of the native NDT annotation scheme to spoken language phenomena, such as pauses and various types of disfluencies, and present the subsequent conversion of the treebank to the Universal Dependencies scheme. The treebank currently consists of 13,608 tokens, distributed over 1396 segments taken from three different dialects of spoken Norwegian. The LIA treebank annotation is an on-going effort and future releases will extend on the current data set. Keywords: treebanks, spoken language, dialects, Norwegian, Universal Dependencies 1. Introduction Large-scale initiatives like the CoNLL shared tasks on de- pendency parsing (Surdeanu et al., 2008), the Universal Dependencies (UD) initiative (Nivre et al., 2016) and the recent shared task on multilingual parsing from raw text (Zeman et al., 2017) have made available syntactic tree- banks for a large number of languages, thus enabling pars- ing research for a wide variety of languages. Available tree- banks are still, however, largely based on written textual resources, with a few exceptions (Dobrovoljc and Nivre, 2016; ¨Ostling et al., 2017). The LIA project1 has as its main objective to create a cor- pus consisting of old dialect recordings and make these ac- cessible for research in linguistics and digital humanities. By digitization, transcription and further linguistic process- ing, this corpus can play an important role in the diachronic study of Norwegian dialects and more generally the linguis- tic variation in Norway. This article describes the LIA tree- bank of spoken Norwegian dialects. A longterm goal of this work is to develop a parser for spoken Norwegian, with the immediate goal of parsing the whole LIA material. This will enable more fine-grained linguistic analyses to be car- ried out over the material. In this paper we present the LIA data set, its transcrip- tion and subsequent morphological and syntactic annota- tion, with a focus on the extended annotation guidelines of the Norwegian Dependency Treebank (NDT) for spoken language phenomena and the conversion of the treebanked data to the Universal Dependencies (UD) scheme (de Marn- effe et al., 2014). The UD version of the treebank was made available with the v2.1 release of the UD treebanks (Nivre et al., 2017). 1http://www.hf.uio.no/iln/ english/research/projects/ language-infrastructure-made-accessible 2. The LIA material The LIA project (Language Infrastructure made …

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