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one <strong>in</strong> Greek, the Perseus Ancient Greek Dependency Treebank (AGDT). 147 This section describes
these treebanks and their uses with<strong>in</strong> classical scholarship.
The Lat<strong>in</strong> Dependency Treebank is a 53,143-word collection of syntactically parsed Lat<strong>in</strong> sentences
and it currently stands at version 1.5 with excerpts from eight authors. Because Lat<strong>in</strong> is a heavily
<strong>in</strong>flected language with a great degree of variability <strong>in</strong> its word order, the annotation style of the Lat<strong>in</strong>
Dependency Treebank was based on that of the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT), which was then
tailored for Lat<strong>in</strong> us<strong>in</strong>g the grammar of P<strong>in</strong>kster (Bamman and Crane 2006). Accord<strong>in</strong>g to Bamman
and Crane (2006) there are a variety of potential uses for a Lat<strong>in</strong> treebank, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g “the potential to
be used as a knowledge source <strong>in</strong> a number of traditional l<strong>in</strong>es of <strong>in</strong>quiry, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g rhetoric,
lexicography, philology and historical l<strong>in</strong>guistics.” In their <strong>in</strong>itial research they explored us<strong>in</strong>g the
Lat<strong>in</strong> Dependency Treebank to detail the use of Lat<strong>in</strong> rhetorical devices and to quantify the change
over time <strong>in</strong> Lat<strong>in</strong> from a subject-object-verb word order to a subject-verb-object order. Later research
with the use of the Lat<strong>in</strong> Dependency Treebank made use of the resources with<strong>in</strong> the PDL to provide
advanced read<strong>in</strong>g support and to provide more-sophisticated levels of lemmatized and morphosyntactic
search<strong>in</strong>g (Bamman and Crane 2007).
The IT Treebank is an ongo<strong>in</strong>g project that will <strong>in</strong>clude all of the works of Thomas Aqu<strong>in</strong>as as well as
61 authors related to him and will ultimately <strong>in</strong>clude 179 texts and 11 million tokens. Accord<strong>in</strong>g to its
website, the IT Treebank is “presently composed of 82,141 tokens, for a total of 3,714 syntactically
parsed sentences excerpted from Scriptum super Sententiis Magistri Petri Lombardi, Summa contra
Gentiles and Summa Theologiae.” Their most recent work has explored the development of a valency
lexicon, and the authors argue that although many classical languages projects exist, few have
annotated texts above the morphological level (McGillivray and Passarotti 2009). Nonetheless, the
authors <strong>in</strong>sist “nowadays it is possible and <strong>in</strong>deed necessary to match lexicons with data from
(annotated) corpora, and vice versa. This requires the scholars to exploit the vast amount of textual
data from classical languages already available <strong>in</strong> digital format … and particularly those annotated at
the highest levels.”
Rather than develop their own annotation standards, these two Lat<strong>in</strong> treebank projects worked together
to develop a common standard set of guidel<strong>in</strong>es that they have published onl<strong>in</strong>e. 148 This provides an
important example of the need for different projects with similar goals to not only collaborate but also
to make the results of that collaboration available to others. Another important collaborative feature of
these treebanks is that, particularly <strong>in</strong> the case of the Lat<strong>in</strong> Dependency Treebank, a large number of
graduate and undergraduate students have contributed to this knowledge base.
Other work <strong>in</strong> terms of collaborative treebanks has been conducted by the Perseus Project, which has
created the AGDT. The AGDT, currently <strong>in</strong> version 1.1, is a “192,204-word collection of syntactically
parsed Greek sentences” from Hesiod, Homer, and Aeschylus. The development of the AGDT has
focused on a new model of treebank<strong>in</strong>g, that of the creation of scholarly treebanks (Bamman,
Mambr<strong>in</strong>i, and Crane 2009). While traditional l<strong>in</strong>guistic-annotation projects have focused on creat<strong>in</strong>g
the s<strong>in</strong>gle best annotation (often enforc<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong>terannotator agreement), such a model is poor fit when the
object of annotation itself is an object of <strong>in</strong>tense scholarly debate:
147 For more on the Perseus Lat<strong>in</strong> Dependency Treebank and the AGDT (as well as to download them), see http://nlp.perseus.tufts.edu/syntax/treebank/,
and for the Index Thomisticus Treebank, see http://itreebank.marg<strong>in</strong>alia.it/
148 For the most recent version of the guidel<strong>in</strong>es, see http://hdl.handle.net/10427/42683; for more on the collaboration, see Bamman, Passarotti, and Crane
(2008).