Dependency Parsing on Late-18th-Century German Aesthetic Writings

Data-driven syntactic parsers are usually trained, tested and developed on web-news data. Little has been done to evaluate them on literary genres of different ages, which are still low-resource varieties in terms of syntactic annotation. In this paper, I will describe methodology and results concerning first experiments in testing two different kinds of dependency parsers on aesthetic writings by Schiller and F. Schlegel. First, I trained and tested the parsers on de-ud1.2, a treebank collecting German web-news texts. Second, I manually annotated excerpts by the two authors with syntactic metadata. Third, I tested the parsers on these excerpts, after training them on de-ud1.2