OTA-BOUN: A Historical Turkish Dependency Treebank

Tarık Emre Tıraş, Nureddin Cüneyd Ünal, Ada Cengiz, Ece Yurtseven, Esma F. Bilgin Taşdemir, Saziye Betul Ozates


Abstract
We present OTA-BOUN v2.0, the largest Universal Dependencies treebank for historical Turkish, consisting of 1,742 manually verified sentences sampled from late Ottoman texts. The annotation process followed a semi-automatic methodology: initial pre-annotation by the UDPipe 2.0 pipeline was refined through manual annotation of dependency relations, part-of-speech tags, and lemmas. A distinctive feature of OTA-BOUN is its dual-script representation: each sentence is provided both in the original Perso-Arabic script and its Latinized transcription, while tokens include aligned forms in both scripts. This dual-layer design enables research on script conversion, cross-lingual transfer, and historical–modern Turkish comparisons. Through detailed analyses on the aforementioned treebank, this study presents a unique and scalable resource, advancing computational studies of historical Turkish and supporting broader efforts in multilingual and diachronic NLP.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.551
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
6929–6938
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-551
DOI:
10.63317/3d985kzhy84r
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tarık Emre Tıraş, Nureddin Cüneyd Ünal, Ada Cengiz, Ece Yurtseven, Esma F. Bilgin Taşdemir, and Saziye Betul Ozates. 2026. OTA-BOUN: A Historical Turkish Dependency Treebank. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6929–6938, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
OTA-BOUN: A Historical Turkish Dependency Treebank (Tıraş et al., LREC 2026)
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