Universal Dependencies for Danish

The Universal Dependencies (UD) project aims at developing treebank annotations consistent across many languages. In this paper, we present the conversion of the Copenhagen Dependency Treebank (CDT) into Universal Dependencies (UD). We describe the original CDT annotation and detail the mapping into the new UD formalism, which we accomplish by taking a test-driven approach. We present parsing experiments with both formalisms. Additionally, we quantitatively compare the resulting Danish UD treebank to the other languages available in the UD project (v1.2), discussing constructions that are specific to Danish. Our results show that the newly created Danish UD treebank is closely related to treebanks of typologically similar languages. However, parsing with the new treebank becomes more difficult, relative to the old formalism.

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