Rhymes and Syntax: A Morpho-Syntactic Analysis of Czech Poetry

Abstract

A linguistically informed distant reading presupposes an adequate performance of Natural Language Processing tools. This article describes our evaluation of the UDPipe parser on a manually annotated sample of nineteenth-century Czech poetry in the following steps: (1) creation of a documented data set for this domain (poetry, nineteenth century, Czech); (2) domain-specific annotation decisions; (3) error analysis. The sample consisted of 29 randomly selected poems which were first automatically tagged and parsed with the UDPipe parser and then manually checked word by word. The following features were checked: word segmentation (chunking), lemmatization, part of speech assignment, assignment of more fine-grained morphological details, the position in the syntactic dependency tree (selection of the syntactic parent), as well as the label of the syntactic relation between the word and its parent. The findings were analyzed. The most typical parser errors are associated with complex noun phrases that contain other noun(s) as modifier(s), especially when these occur in a poetry-specific word order, that is, preposed to the governing noun. On the other hand, neither archaic orthography nor neologisms posed substantial issues.