We present a new version of the Croatian Dependency Treebank. It constitutes a slight departure from the previously closely observed Prague Dependency Treebank syntactic layer annotation guidelines as we introduce a new subset of syntactic tags on top of the existing tagset. These new tags are used in explicit annotation of subordinate clauses via subordinate conjunctions. Introducing the new annotation to Croatian Dependency Treebank, we also modify head attachment rules addressing subordinate conjunctions and subordinate clause predicates. In an experiment with data-driven dependency parsing, we show that implementing these new annotation guidelines leeds to a statistically significant improvement in parsing accuracy. We also observe a substantial improvement in inter-annotator agreement, facilitating more consistent annotation in further treebank development.

In recent years large repositories of structured knowledge (DBpedia, Freebase, YAGO) have become a valuable resource for language technologies, especially for the automatic aggregation of knowledge from textual data. One essential component of language technologies, which leverage such knowledge bases, is the linking of words or phrases in specific text documents with elements from the knowledge base (KB). We call this semantic annotation. In the same time, initiatives like Wikidata try to make those knowledge bases less language dependent in order to allow cross-lingual or language independent knowledge access. This poses a new challenge to semantic annotation tools which typically are language dependent and link documents in one language to a structured knowledge base grounded in the same language. Ultimately, the goal is to construct cross-lingual semantic annotation tools that can link words or phrases in one language to a structured knowledge database in any other language or to a language independent representation. To support this line of research we developed what we believe could serve as a gold standard Resource for Evaluating Cross-lingual Semantic Annotation (RECSA). We compiled a hand-annotated parallel corpus of 300 news articles in three languages with cross-lingual semantic groundings to the English Wikipedia and DBPedia. We hope that this new language resource, which is freely available, will help to establish a standard test set and methodology to comparatively evaluate cross-lingual semantic annotation technologies.

We present the current state of development of the Croatian Dependency Treebank ― with special empahsis on adapting the Prague Dependency Treebank formalism to Croatian language specifics ― and illustrate its possible applications in an experiment with dependency parsing using MaltParser. The treebank currently contains approximately 2870 sentences, out of which the 2699 sentences and 66930 tokens were used in this experiment. Three linear-time projective algorithms implemented by the MaltParser system ― Nivre eager, Nivre standard and stack projective ― running on default settings were used in the experiment. The highest performing system, implementing the Nivre eager algorithm, scored (LAS 71.31 UAS 80.93 LA 83.87) within our experiment setup. The results obtained serve as an illustration of treebank's usefulness in natural language processing research and as a baseline for further research in dependency parsing of Croatian.