Making the low-resource language, Icelandic, accessible and usable in Language Technology is a work in progress and is supported by the Icelandic government. Creating resources and suitable training data (e.g., a dependency treebank) is a fundamental part of that work. We describe work on a parallel Icelandic dependency treebank based on Universal Dependencies (UD). This is important because it is the first parallel treebank resource for the language and since several other languages already have a resource based on the same text. Two Icelandic treebanks based on phrase-structure grammar have been built and ongoing work aims to convert them to UD. Previously, limited work has been done on dependency grammar for Icelandic. The current project aims to ameliorate this situation by creating a small dependency treebank from scratch. Creating a treebank is a laborious task so the process was implemented in an accessible manner using freely available tools and resources. The parallel data in the UD project was chosen as a source because this would furthermore give us the first parallel treebank for Icelandic. The Icelandic parallel UD corpus will be published as part of UD version 2.6.

The topic of this paper is a rule-based pipeline for converting constituency treebanks based on the Penn Treebank format to Universal Dependencies (UD). We describe an Icelandic constituency treebank, its annotation scheme and the UD scheme. The conversion is discussed, the methods used to deliver a fully automated UD corpus and complications involved. To show its applicability to corpora in different languages, we extend the pipeline and convert a Faroese constituency treebank to a UD corpus. The result is an open-source conversion tool, published under an Apache 2.0 license, applicable to a Penn-style treebank for conversion to a UD corpus, along with the two new UD corpora.