Mercurius Treebank

The aim of this project was the enrichment of an Early New High German newspaper text with syntactic information. We used the TIGER annotation scheme, which was developed out of the NEGRA scheme, which facilitates semi-automatic annotation of constituents and syntactic functions, which simultaneously permitting edge crossing. The annotation process is meant to identify the specific problems posed by the syntactical interpretation of historical texts and to adjust the processes in question accordingly. At the same time, this created the first building block for a treebank of Early New High German. In the meantime, this treebank has been expanded to include another year of newspapers. Now, with the Mercurius of 1667 and the Annus Christi of 1597, we have a newspaper corpus containing 170,000 word forms, syntactically annotated. 

Project duration: 2003 to 2005