In this paper we present the results of an ongoing experiment of bootstrapping a Treebank for Catalan by using a Dependency Parser trained with Spanish sentences. In order to save time and cost, our approach was to profit from the typological similarities between Catalan and Spanish to create a first Catalan data set quickly by automatically: (i) annotating with a de-lexicalized Spanish parser, (ii) manually correcting the parses, and (iii) using the Catalan corrected sentences to train a Catalan parser. The results showed that the number of parsed sentences required to train a Catalan parser is about 1000 that were achieved in 4 months, with 2 annotators.

This paper presents the IULA Spanish LSP Treebank, a dependency treebank of over 41,000 sentences of different domains (Law, Economy, Computing Science, Environment, and Medicine), developed in the framework of the European project METANET4U. Dependency annotations in the treebank were automatically derived from manually selected parses produced by an HPSG-grammar by a deterministic conversion algorithm that used the identifiers of grammar rules to identify the heads, the dependents, and some dependency types that were directly transferred onto the dependency structure (e.g., subject, specifier, and modifier), and the identifiers of the lexical entries to identify the argument-related dependency functions (e.g. direct object, indirect object, and oblique complement). The treebank is accessible with a browser that provides concordance-based search functions and delivers the results in two formats: (i) a column-based format, in the style of CoNLL-2006 shared task, and (ii) a dependency graph, where dependency relations are noted by an oriented arrow which goes from the dependent node to the head node. The IULA Spanish LSP Treebank is the first technical corpus of Spanish annotated at surface syntactic level following the dependency grammar theory. The treebank has been made publicly and freely available from the META-SHARE platform with a Creative Commons CC-by licence.