Metrical annotation for a verse treebank

Abstract

We present a methodology for enriching treebanks containing verse texts with metrical annotation, and present a pilot corpus containing one Old Occitan text. Metrical annotation is based on syllable tokens, and is generated semi-automatically using two algorithms, one to divide word tokens into syllables, and a second to mark the position of each syllable in the line. Syntactic and metrical annotation is combined in a single multi-layered ANNIS corpus. Three initial findings based on the pilot corpus illustrate the close relation between syntactic and metrical structure, and hence the value of enriching treebanks in this way.