META-NORD Sofie Parallel Treebank

The Sofie Parallel Treebank is a syntactically annotated parallel corpus based on the first chapters of the novel “Sofies verden” by Jostein Gaarder, published by Aschehoug forlag. The treebank is a product of the META-NORD project and its goal to promote the accessability of existing treebanks for the languages in the project.

SOURCE TEXT

The Norwegian novel Sofies verden (Gaarder 1991) was chosen as a suitable basis for treebanking because it is linguistically rich and professionally translated in many languages, and because some treebanks already existed for text selections from this material in some languages in the META-NORD area.

Previous work was done by the Nordic Treebank Network, funded by the Nordic Language Technology Program (2001-2005) but had not been maintained and was no longer accessible. It was decided to gather those treebanks, document them, supplement them with additional treebanks for some languages where this effort was feasible, and make the resulting resources accessible. The resulting work has been a joint effort between META-NORD and the INESS project, which hosts the treebank.

The rights for the Finnish treebank have not been cleared, and this treebank is currently unavailable.

More information about the treebank development in META-NORD is available in the META-NORD Deliverable 3.4 on Parallel Treebanks (http://www.meta-nord.eu).