Reading supported by dependency trees, a prototype

Treebank annotations transformed into a reading page which shows dependencies between words in sentences.

Posted by Neven Jovanović on January 2, 2020

Using dependency tree fragments: a prototype

The hypothesis is that we can understand a Greek sentence easier if we can check any word in it and see which word it is dependent on, and which word is governed by it.

The following selections (check out the links) have been transformed into prototypes of such a fragmentary display. The dependency tree annotations help readers orientate in something resembling a reading environment (with tooltips showing lemmata):

A commented selection from Josephus Flavius, BJ 1, 11

The treebank annotations I have used come from the wonderful treebank collection of Vanessa Gorman. The texts are published under a CC license by the Perseus Digital Library.

The ALDT XML was transformed by the XQuery script transformALDTtoHTMLwithHighlight.xq.

Some jQuery was used for (very simple) highlighting functions.

Lemmata are shown by the PowerTip jQuery plugin.

The presentation was inspired by Christopher Blackwell’s work.