Data-driven dependency parsing of Vedic Sanskrit

Abstract

This paper describes the first data-driven parser for Vedic Sanskrit, an ancient Indo-Aryan language in which a corpus of important religious and philosophical texts has been composed. We report and critically discuss experiments with the input feature representations, paying special attention to the performance of contextualized word embeddings and to the influence of morpho-syntactic representations on the parsing quality. In addition, we provide an in-depth discussion of the parsing errors that covers structural traits of the predicted trees as well as linguistic and extra-textual influence factors. In its optimal configuration, the proposed model achieves 87.61 unlabeled and 81.84 labeled attachment score on a held-out set of test sentences, demonstrating good performance for an under-resourced language.