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Towards a Universal Dependency Corpus for Old Saxon (Old Low German)

Among the West Germanic languages of the first millenium C.E. (Old English, Old Low Franconian/Old Dutch, Old High German, and – although much later – Old Frisian), Old Saxon occupies a special role both linguistically – in that it represents a middle ground in the dialect spectrum between Old English at one extreme and Old High German on the other –, and in terms of material quality, in that it is attested with considerable amounts of coherent text (unlike Old Low Franconian) which is not only particularly old (unlike, especially, Old Frisian), but also original (i.e., not translated, a rarity in the attested Old English and Old High German material). It is thus a language central to the understanding of the emergence of several modern major languages, incl. English, Dutch and German, and has been studied intensely, albeit – so far – not in the context of the Universal Dependencies. This paper addresses this gap and describes the introduction of (a) a manually annotated test corpus of Old Saxon, (b) a highly reusable conversion pipeline for converting the Penn bracketing syntax of the Penn Historical Corpora (and the Old Saxon Heliand) to UD, and (c) the evaluation of the latter against the manual annotations.