Dialectal treebanks and their relation with the standard variety: The case of East Cretan and Standard Modern Greek

Socrates Vakirtzian, Vivian Stamou, Yannis Kazos, Stella Markantonatou


Abstract
We report on the development of the first treebank and parser for Eastern Cretan in the framework of Universal Dependencies (UD). Eastern Cretan is a living but under-resourced dialect of Modern Greek. We have worked on the transcription of oral material and relied on active annotation and knowledge transfer from GUD, a treebank of Standard Modern Greek. Along with its other phonological and morphosyntactic differences from Standard Modern Greek, Eastern Cretan (and other varieties of Modern Greek) makes heavy use of euphonics and voicing that have not been included in the UD annotation guidelines so far. We have provided annotation guidelines for East Cretan euphonics and voicing and included them in the models. Knowledge transfer from the treebank of Standard Modern Greek to the dialectal models helped to initiate annotation via an active annotation procedure
Anthology ID:
2025.nodalida-1.77
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025)
Month:
march
Year:
2025
Address:
Tallinn, Estonia
Editors:
Richard Johansson, Sara Stymne
Venue:
NoDaLiDa
SIG:
Publisher:
University of Tartu Library
Note:
Pages:
776–784
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.nodalida-1.77/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Socrates Vakirtzian, Vivian Stamou, Yannis Kazos, and Stella Markantonatou. 2025. Dialectal treebanks and their relation with the standard variety: The case of East Cretan and Standard Modern Greek. In Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025), pages 776–784, Tallinn, Estonia. University of Tartu Library.
Cite (Informal):
Dialectal treebanks and their relation with the standard variety: The case of East Cretan and Standard Modern Greek (Vakirtzian et al., NoDaLiDa 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.nodalida-1.77.pdf