cs.CLApr 7, 2026

THIVLVC: Retrieval Augmented Dependency Parsing for Latin

Authors: Luc Pommeret, Thibault Wagret, Jules Deret

Organizations: STL · Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, LISN, 91400, Orsay, France · ENS de Lyon, HiSoMA · École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, HISOMA, 69007, Lyon, France

Abstract

We describe THIVLVC, a two-stage system for the EvaLatin 2026 Dependency Parsing task. Given a Latin sentence, we retrieve structurally similar entries from the CIRCSE treebank using sentence length and POS n-gram similarity, then prompt a large language model to refine the baseline parse from UDPipe using the retrieved examples and UD annotation guidelines. We submit two configurations: one without retrieval and one with retrieval (RAG). On poetry (Seneca), THIVLVC improves CLAS by +17 points over the UDPipe baseline; on prose (Thomas Aquinas), the gain is +1.5 CLAS. A double-blind error analysis of 300 divergences between our system and the gold standard reveals that, among unanimous annotator decisions, 53.3% favour THIVLVC, showing annotation inconsistencies both within and across treebanks.

Figures & tables

Appendix figures & tables8 assets

Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.

Appendix

Explore similar work

Sep 5, 2026

Correction as Annotation: Bootstrapping a Dependency Parser for Documentary Medieval Latin

Medieval documentary sources remain inadequately served by existing natural language processing tools. None of the five readily available Latin treebank models attains usable performance on a collection of 160 inventories compiled in Marseille between 1258 and 1446. The best labelled attachment score is 0.62 and the best morphology-aware score is 0.24. Performance does not correlate with either genre or period proximity. To address this shortfall, in-domain training data was generated as a by-product of using these inadequate models. In each of nine iterations, a model pre-annotated 200 sentences; an expert corrected the annotations; and the corrected sentences were used to train the subsequent model, with batches sampled independently of model state, without active-learning selection. Thirty-three hours of annotation effort over 1,804 sentences increased universal part-of-speech accuracy from 0.80 to 0.98 and labelled attachment from 0.48 to 0.92, outperforming all baselines on the reported metrics while using 97% less training data than the largest one of them. Annotator effort declined from 54% of tokens to a plateau of 14-18%, an operational progress metric that requires no separate gold standard and can serve as a stopping criterion.
Sep 23, 2026

ThaiTrees: Thai Syntactic Dependency Trees Across Domains

Studying syntactic patterns in naturally occurring language requires a large parsed corpus, but manual annotation is costly and difficult to scale. Thai has a manually annotated dependency treebank for training and evaluating parsers, but lacks a large automatically parsed corpus for quantitative syntactic research. We present ThaiTrees, a 342M-token corpus drawn from news, Wikipedia, spoken transcripts, and social media. We develop a reproducible pipeline for cleaning, processing, and parsing Thai text under the Universal Dependencies framework. The resulting corpus makes grammatical relations searchable and supports the study of syntactic distributions. We release a frequency lexicon and CoNLL-U parses in machine-readable formats suitable for both AI-assisted and conventional programmatic analysis.
May 21, 2026

A Reproducible Universal Dependencies-Style Pipeline for Katharevousa Greek Parliamentary Text

Katharevousa Greek remains poorly served by contemporary NLP pipelines despite its importance for legal, administrative, and parliamentary archives. We present a reproducible workflow for building and evaluating a Universal Dependencies-style parsing resource for Katharevousa parliamentary questions from Greece's early post-junta period. The pipeline links OCR-aware reconstruction, schema-constrained LLM-assisted annotation, automatic validation, deterministic CoNLL-U snapshotting, fixed-split evaluation, and model-family comparison. The frozen automatically validated reference set contains 1{,}697 sentences, split into 1{,}357 training sentences and 340 held-out test sentences. We compare off-the-shelf Greek and Ancient Greek parsers, a feature-based parser, mBERT, XLM-R, and custom Stanza training under the same scoring protocol. Off-the-shelf systems show substantial register mismatch: the strongest external baseline, spaCy Greek, reaches 0.4183 LAS. The best structural parser, an XLM-R model, reaches 0.8893 UPOS accuracy, 0.7250 dependency-relation F1, 0.6098 UAS, and 0.5162 LAS, an absolute LAS gain of 0.0980 over the best external baseline. The feature-based model remains competitive for UPOS and relation labeling, indicating that transparent lexical-context features still matter at this data scale. Beyond scores, the paper contributes an auditable methodology for turning difficult historical parliamentary OCR into reusable syntactic NLP infrastructure. The entire pipeline -- code, schema, frozen reference annotations, fixed train/test split, and per-model benchmark reports -- is released as an open-access companion to this paper.