---
title: "Croatian Dependency Treebank 2.0 — Agić 2014"
description: "The paper describes the second version of the Croatian Dependency Treebank (HOBS)."
authors: ["Željko Agić", "Daša Berović", "Danijela Merkler", "Marko Tadić"]
year: 2014
venue: "Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/L14-1545/"
licence: "CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/agic-2014-croatian-dependency-treebank-2-0/"
---
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# Croatian Dependency Treebank 2.0: New Annotation Guidelines for Improved Parsing

**Authors:** [Željko Agić](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/zeljko-agic/), Daša Berović, Danijela Merkler, [Marko Tadić](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/marko-tadic/) · **Year:** 2014 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (ACL Anthology, before 2016)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L14-1545/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L14-1545.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2251128110)

**Citations:** 5 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [3](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary

The paper describes the second version of the Croatian Dependency Treebank (HOBS). The first edition of this treebank closely followed the analytical layer of annotation of the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT). The authors note that the Czech model does not fully suit Croatian subordinate clauses. In Croatian grammar, the pronouns and adverbs that introduce a subordinate clause function as conjunctions. HOBS 1.0 treated connective words this way in most subordinate clauses, but annotated relative clauses after the Czech pattern, which produced inconsistency. In HOBS 2.0, the conjunction receives a new tag, Sub (instead of AuxC), marked with the type of the subordinate clause. Adverbial clauses are further subdivided by meaning (time, condition, concession, etc.). The attachment rules have also been unified: the conjunction depends on the predicate of the main clause, and the predicate of the subordinate clause depends on the conjunction and now always carries the tag Pred. The corpus was manually converted to the new scheme. Inter-annotator agreement increased noticeably. The graph-based parser MSTParser performs with statistically significantly higher accuracy on HOBS 2.0 than on HOBS 1.0, even though the new version has more tags. Thus, aligning the annotation scheme with the grammar of a particular language makes manual annotation more consistent and automatic parsing more accurate.

## Key points

- **New tags.** The conjunction of a subordinate clause is marked with the tag Sub (by analogy with Coord in coordination), with a specification of its type: Atr, Adv, Obj, Pred or Sb. Adverbial clauses have eight further subtypes: place, time, manner, cause, result, purpose, condition and concession.
- **Experiment.** MSTParser and tenfold cross-validation with a 9:1 split were used. Significance was tested with approximate randomization. Even the HOBS 2.0 models with the full set (81 tags) significantly outperformed the HOBS 1.0 models with both the basic (27 tags) and the full (70 tags) set. The advantage holds for all three metrics, including LAS and UAS.
- **Key functions (basic sets, LAS).** Pred: 65.89 → 80.69 (+14.8), Sb: 68.85 → 73.99 (+5.14), Obj: 62.81 → 70.06. The share of word forms tagged Pred roughly doubled (from 4.76% to over 9%), since predicates of subordinate clauses are now marked explicitly. The LAS for Sub (72.91) is decent relative to overall accuracy, but attachment to the head (UAS 73.89) still needs improvement.
- **Learning curves.** Training was done on nine subsets from 500 to 4500 sentences. The learning rate is similar, but the LAS curves for HOBS 2.0 are consistently higher than those for HOBS 1.0. Models with the basic tag set have higher curves than models with the full one.
- **Availability and plans.** Both versions of HOBS are available for research via META-SHARE. The authors plan to combine HOBS 1.0, HOBS 2.0 and SETimes.HR to improve parsing. They also want to explore delexicalized parsing on Croatian and Slovene treebanks and to add semantic annotation.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/shelves/linguistics/)

Topics: [Treebanks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/treebanks/)

## Cited by

Cited by

3 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 1 of them have a page here, 2 not yet.

- [Universal Dependencies for Croatian (that work for Serbian, too)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/agic-2015-universal-dependencies-croatian-that-work/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{agic2014croatian,
  title = {{Croatian Dependency Treebank 2.0: New Annotation Guidelines for Improved Parsing}},
  author = {Agić, Željko and Berović, Daša and Merkler, Danijela and Tadić, Marko},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.63317/2n7oie4t94xy},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2n7oie4t94xy}
}
```

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## References

26 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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