We present a dependency treebank of the Chinese Buddhist Canon, which contains 1,514 texts with about 50 million Chinese characters. The treebank was created by an automatic parser trained on a smaller treebank, containing four manually annotated sutras (Lee and Kong, 2014). We report results on word segmentation, part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing, and discuss challenges posed by the processing of medieval Chinese. In a case study, we exploit the treebank to examine verbs frequently associated with Buddha, and to analyze usage patterns of quotative verbs in direct speech. Our results suggest that certain quotative verbs imply status differences between the speaker and the listener.
@InProceedings{WONG16.1234,
author = {Tak-sum Wong and John Lee}, title = {A Dependency Treebank of the Chinese Buddhist Canon}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
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