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# A Universal Dependencies Treebank of Ancient Hebrew

**Authors:** [Daniel G. Swanson](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/daniel-g-swanson/); [Francis M. Tyers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/francis-m-tyers/) · **Year:** 2022 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2022) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.252](https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.252/) · library `ud-2022-swanson-universal-dependencies-treebank-ancient-hebrew` · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) (ELRA, LREC proceedings) — summary only

[**0** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W7160280495) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**6** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/ud-2022-swanson-universal-dependencies-treebank-ancient-hebrew/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2022.lrec-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.252/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.252.pdf)
- [DOI 10.63317/2yt3qrey37nj](https://doi.org/10.63317/2yt3qrey37nj)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7160280495)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Daniel G. Swanson](https://openalex.org/A5006338200) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9847-8111) · h 2 · 38 citations · 9 works
2. [Francis M. Tyers](https://openalex.org/A5076604380) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6108-2220) · h 21 · 2530 citations · 154 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex-snapshot (2026-10-14); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The authors build the first UD treebank of Biblical Hebrew, the books of Genesis and Ruth (1,579 sentences). The source is the BHSA, a morphologically tagged table of the Hebrew Bible that has word-level features but only a flat phrase and clause structure. The BHSA tokenization is adjusted to UD (pronominal suffixes are not split in the BHSA, and must be), its tags are mapped to UD, and a rule-based parser of about 300 rules, written in Constraint Grammar, attaches the arcs; punctuation is attached afterwards and every tree is checked by hand. As a consistency test, a UDPipe parser trained on the whole corpus does not reproduce it perfectly; its errors cluster on nmod versus obl attachment after a noun and on where a quotation ends. The treebank is released with the UD project.

## Ideas

- I1. Suffix splitting as a table in `tools/hbo`: the BHSA leaves pronominal suffixes attached (the form for "to guard him" is one token), while UD splits them. Write the split as a rule with a test list of suffixed verbs, prepositions and nouns taken from the treebank, and report the count per class.
- I2. Use the paper's error analysis as a list of hard classes for the parser: nmod against obl after a noun, and the end of a quotation. Each class gets one measure on held-out sentences, so that a gain in one does not hide a loss in another.
- I3. Train `gparse` on the treebank and parse it back as a sanity check, as the authors do with UDPipe; a model that cannot reproduce its own training data shows the annotation is not yet consistent enough to be memorised.

## For Mova

I1 goes into `tools/hbo` (segmenter tables, the suffix split) and [The Noun, the Adjective and the Numeral](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/04-noun/) for the noun suffixes. I2 is a set of tests for `tools/hbo` and `gparse` on the hard classes, with the attachment rule itself in [Syntax: the clause and the sentence](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/hbo/08-syntax/). I3 is a check on `treebanks/hbo/ptnk`, used only as a test, never as training data for a release (licence NC).

Topics: [Universal Dependencies](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/universal-dependencies/) · [Treebanks](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/treebanks/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.63317/2yt3qrey37nj](https://doi.org/10.63317/2yt3qrey37nj)

```
@inproceedings{swanson2022universal,
  title = {{A Universal Dependencies Treebank of Ancient Hebrew}},
  author = {Swanson, Daniel G. and Tyers, Francis M.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.63317/2yt3qrey37nj},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2yt3qrey37nj}
}
```

- [← previous Generating Hebrew Verb Morphology by Default Inheritance Hierarchies](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/onto-2002-finkel-generating-hebrew-verb-morphology-default/)
- [next → Allen Institute for AI @ SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task on Word Embedding Evaluation for Ancient and Historical Languages](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ud-2024-miranda-allen-institute-ai-sigtyp-2024/)
- [↑ back to Ancient Hebrew](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/hbo/)

## References

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