When designing a treebanking assignment, you need to decide three things before you begin; Your Text, Your Tagset, and how much Time you want to dedicate to treebanking in your classroom.
Texts
We have a selection of Latin and Greek texts available on Arethusa, and we encourage you to look and see what texts are available. If you want to work with a text which is currently unavailable, you can work on preparing it for treebanking yourself, or you can contact us.
Some educators wish to work with texts which have been treebanked in the past. Those treebank files are listed here.
If you wish to work with your students to produce a treebank for new text, contact information for contributing to the Ancient Language Dependency Treebank is also available at the above link.
The Arethusa new Treeabank page is able to generate a tree from a plain text input. If you want to use this tool with example sentences from your textbook of choice, we recommend this input method.
Tagset
Built into the Arethusa new Treeabank page is the option to select from a list of available tagsets. Documentation for each of these tagsets is available online. We encourage you to select from the following list for Ancient Greek or Latin treebanking.
ALDT (Ancient Language Dependency Treebank)- Which follows the Prague dependency standards. Also has versions which will not populate a tree with Morphological information.
Smyth Grammar Tagset– An Ancient Greek Tagset based on the Smyth Greek Grammar, and designed by Giuseppe G. A. Celano.
JMH Tagsets – A Greek and Latin Tagset designed by Prof Matthew Harrington at Tufts University which maps to the standard conventions for teaching Greek and Latin.
These tagsets are well documented and allow the trees you produce to be integrated into existing treeabank projects. There are other tagsets available built into Arethusa, though not available from the main page. It is also possible to design your own tagset, however, we only recommend that to users with advanced technical knowledge.
Time
This is the most personalized section of the Preparation guide and is entirely dependent on how much time you want to spend on treebanking in your classroom. It is entirely possible to build an entire class around treebanking, or to have them be supplemental to the core of the class. We will discuss this more in the Classroom section. Two timetables are important to keep in mind when deigning a treebanking project, class time and out of class time.