Cheating a Parser to Death: Data-driven Cross-Treebank Annotation Transfer

We present an efficient and accurate method for transferring annotations between two different treebanks of the same language. This method led to the creation of a new instance of the French Treebank (Abeille et al., 2003), which follows the Universal Dependency annotation scheme and which was proposed to the participants of the CoNLL 2017 Universal Dependency parsing shared task (Zeman et al., 2017). Strong results from an evaluation on our gold standard (94.75% of LAS, 99.40% UAS on the test set) demonstrate the quality of this new annotated data set and validate our approach.