@inproceedings{luecking-etal-2024-dependencies,
    title = "Dependencies over Times and Tools ({D}o{TT})",
    author = "Luecking, Andy  and
      Abrami, Giuseppe  and
      Hammerla, Leon  and
      Rahn, Marc  and
      Baumartz, Daniel  and
      Eger, Steffen  and
      Mehler, Alexander",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.415",
    pages = "4641--4653",
    abstract = "Purpose: Based on the examples of English and German, we investigate to what extent parsers trained on modern variants of these languages can be transferred to older language levels without loss. Methods: We developed a treebank called DoTT (https://github.com/texttechnologylab/DoTT) which covers, roughly, the time period from 1800 until today, in conjunction with the further development of the annotation tool DependencyAnnotator. DoTT consists of a collection of diachronic corpora enriched with dependency annotations using 3 parsers, 6 pre-trained language models, 5 newly trained models for German, and two tag sets (TIGER and Universal Dependencies). To assess how the different parsers perform on texts from different time periods, we created a gold standard sample as a benchmark. Results: We found that the parsers/models perform quite well on modern texts (document-level LAS ranging from 82.89 to 88.54) and slightly worse on older texts, as expected (average document-level LAS 84.60 vs. 86.14), but not significantly. For German texts, the (German) TIGER scheme achieved slightly better results than UD. Conclusion: Overall, this result speaks for the transferability of parsers to past language levels, at least dating back until around 1800. This very transferability, it is however argued, means that studies of language change in the field of dependency syntax can draw on dependency distance but miss out on some grammatical phenomena.",
}

Purpose: Based on the examples of English and German, we investigate to what extent parsers trained on modern variants of these languages can be transferred to older language levels without loss. Methods: We developed a treebank called DoTT (https://github.com/texttechnologylab/DoTT) which covers, roughly, the time period from 1800 until today, in conjunction with the further development of the annotation tool DependencyAnnotator. DoTT consists of a collection of diachronic corpora enriched with dependency annotations using 3 parsers, 6 pre-trained language models, 5 newly trained models for German, and two tag sets (TIGER and Universal Dependencies). To assess how the different parsers perform on texts from different time periods, we created a gold standard sample as a benchmark. Results: We found that the parsers/models perform quite well on modern texts (document-level LAS ranging from 82.89 to 88.54) and slightly worse on older texts, as expected (average document-level LAS 84.60 vs. 86.14), but not significantly. For German texts, the (German) TIGER scheme achieved slightly better results than UD. Conclusion: Overall, this result speaks for the transferability of parsers to past language levels, at least dating back until around 1800. This very transferability, it is however argued, means that studies of language change in the field of dependency syntax can draw on dependency distance but miss out on some grammatical phenomena.
Luecking, Andy Abrami, Giuseppe Hammerla, Leon Rahn, Marc Baumartz, Daniel Eger, Steffen Mehler, Alex er
Dependencies over Times and Tools (DoTT)