Developing the old Tibetan treebank

Abstract

This paper presents a full procedure for the development of a segmented, POS-tagged and chunk-parsed corpus of Old Tibetan. As an extremely low-resource language, Old Tibetan poses non-trivial problems in every step towards the development of a searchable treebank. We demonstrate, however, that a carefully developed, semi-supervised method of optimising and extending existing tools for Classical Tibetan, as well as creating specific ones for Old Tibetan, can address these issues. We thus also present the very first Tibetan Treebank in a variety of formats to facilitate research in the fields of NLP, historical linguistics and Tibetan Studies.