---
title: "Universal dependencies for Scottish Gaelic — Batchelor 2019"
description: "Scottish Gaelic is a low-resource language and until now has lacked a reliable syntactic parser."
authors: ["Colin Batchelor"]
year: 2019
venue: "Proceedings of the Celtic Language Technology Workshop"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/W19-6902/"
licence: "CC BY-ND 4.0 (stated in the PDF)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/batchelor-2019-universal-dependencies-scottish-gaelic-syntax/"
---
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# Universal dependencies for Scottish Gaelic: syntax

**Authors:** Colin Batchelor · **Year:** 2019 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Celtic Language Technology Workshop · **Licence:** [CC BY-ND 4.0 (stated in the PDF)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W19-6902/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W19-6902.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3089158381)

**Citations:** 3 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [7](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Scottish Gaelic is a low-resource language and until now has lacked a reliable syntactic parser. The author creates the first moderately sized treebank for it within UD. The corpus contains 1021 sentences from the ARCOSG corpus: fiction, news, narratives, and formal and popular texts. The existing manual morphological annotation of ARCOSG was automatically converted to the CoNLL-U format. During conversion, the tags were mapped to UPOS, and lemmas and grammatical features were added. The dependency trees were built iteratively. First, a small portion was annotated manually. Then MaltParser parsed the rest of the text, and the annotator checked the output and added the corrected trees to the training data. The annotation scheme was brought as close as possible to the Irish treebank. Contentious decisions concerning tokenization, copular constructions, the verbal noun, and cosubordination are discussed separately, with comparisons to the Irish and Breton corpora. In ten-fold cross-validation, the udpipe parser achieved a LAS of about 0.79. This resource provides a foundation for NLP tools for an endangered language. It also opens up the possibility of joint experiments with Irish.

## Key points
- Treebank size: 1021 sentences, approximately 20 thousand tokens. The subcorpora of conversations, interviews, and sports commentary have not yet been included. More than 750 sentences are still awaiting addition, and 30 sentences with cosubordination have been set aside.
- ARCOSG consists of 76 texts and has more than 200 morphological tags. The author converts it from the Brown Corpus format to CoNLL-U and maps the tags to UD v2.
- Tokenization differs from ARCOSG. Multiword units such as *ann an* are split into separate tokens, and the prefixes h-, n-, t- are attached to the following word. Inflected prepositions (*orm*) remain a single word, as in the Irish corpus, rather than being split into two, as in the Breton one.
- Cosubordination is considered in two variants. The first relies on the acl relation and yields non-projective trees. The second treats the construction as ellipsis and uses orphan. The author prefers the first, as it reflects the language more accurately.
- The LAS results for the udpipe (parsito) parser are as follows: 0.796 for the projective transition system, 0.789 for swap, and 0.792 for link2. The author notes that the average sentence length (19.6 words) is relatively short, so these scores may be somewhat inflated.

*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: [Universal Dependencies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/universal-dependencies/) · [Treebanks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/treebanks/)

## Cited by

Cited by

7 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 1 of them have a page here, 6 not yet.

- [Annotation guidelines of UD and SUD treebanks for spoken corpora: A proposal](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ud-2021-kahane-annotation-guidelines-ud-sud-treebanks/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{batchelor2019universal,
  title = {{Universal dependencies for Scottish Gaelic: syntax}},
  author = {Batchelor, Colin},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Celtic Language Technology Workshop},
  year = {2019},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W19-6902/}
}
```

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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.

1. Batchelor, Colin. 2014. gdbank: The beginnings of a corpus of dependency structures and type-logical grammar in Scottish Gaelic. In Proceedings of the First Celtic Language Technology Workshop, pages 60–65, Dublin, Ireland, August. Association for Computational Linguistics and Dublin City University… [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Batchelor%2C+Colin%2E+2014%2E+gdbank%3A+The+beginnings+of+a+corpus+of+dependency+structures+and+type%2Dlogical+grammar+in+Scottish+Gaelic%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+First+Celtic+Language+Technology+Workshop%2C+pages+)
2. Batchelor, Colin. 2016. Automatic derivation of categorial grammar from a part-of-speech-tagged corpus in Scottish Gaelic. In Actes de la conférence conjointe JEP-TALN-RECITAL 2016, volume 6 : CLTW, Paris, France, July. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Batchelor%2C+Colin%2E+2016%2E+Automatic+derivation+of+categorial+grammar+from+a+part%2Dof%2Dspeech%2Dtagged+corpus+in+Scottish+Gaelic%2E+In+Actes+de+la+confe%CC%81rence+conjointe+JEP%2DTALN%2DRECITAL+2016%2C+volume+6+%3A+CLTW%2C+)
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