Annotation schemes in North Sámi dependency parsing

In this paper we describe a comparison of two annotation schemes for dependency parsing of North Sámi, a Finno-Ugric language spoken in the north of Scandinavia and Finland. The two annotation schemes are the Giellatekno (GT) scheme which has been used in research and applications for the Sámi languages and Universal Dependencies (UD)which is a cross-lingual scheme aiming to unify annotation stations across languages. We show that we are able to deterministically convert from the Giellatekno scheme to the Universal Dependencies scheme without a loss of parsing performance. While we do not claim that either scheme is a priori a more adequate model of North Sámi syntax, we do argue that the choice of annotation scheme is dependent on the intended application. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution–NoDerivatives 4.0 International Licence. Licence details: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/