DASG and the second comparative

If you haven’t come across?Dachaigh airson St?ras na G?idhlig/Digital Archive of Scottish Gaelic you should stop what reading this and go straight there.

Welcome back. It contains eight and a half million words and is a resource I keep coming back to. In my first investigation, I’m looking for the second comparative, which I had never seen before last weekend. Here’s an example:

Is feairrde na stamagan srubag dheth

(The stomachs are better for a wee drink in them.) It’s explained in Gillie’s?Elements of Scottish Gaelic Grammar, as differing from the normal comparative (“Xer”) in that it means “Xer by that” or “Xer because of that”. If you search for a word, DASG gives you a concordance so you can look at the local context of words.

Some second comparatives in DASG: feairrd, feairrde, misd, bigid, lughaid. An ambiguous word that might be a second comparative:?m?id. I look forward to a POS-tagged version of DASG.

Training a dependency parser on gdbank

A very quick note to say that I’ve trained maltparser, a dependency parser, with?the current gdbank sentences (a mere 1223 tokens spread across 70-odd sentences), the Universal POS tagging scheme and the current Universal-ish gdbank dependency annotation scheme, and then seen how it performed on an unseen test set of 8 sentences containing 276 tokens taken from an article in The Scotsman from a few years ago.

It got 196 (71%) of the heads right, 207 (75%) of the dependency types right, and both the head and the dependency were right in 187 (68%) of cases. My initial impressions is that the main problems are subordinators and my having mis-POS-tagged a few words, but there will be a confusion matrix soon.