Prague Dependency Style Treebank for Tamil

Annotated corpora such as treebanks are important for the development of parsers, language applications as well as understanding of the language itself. Only very few languages possess these scarce resources. In this paper, we describe our efforts in syntactically annotating a small corpora (600 sentences) of Tamil language. Our annotation is similar to Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT) and consists of annotation at 2 levels or layers: (i) morphological layer (m-layer) and (ii) analytical layer (a-layer). For both the layers, we introduce annotation schemes i.e. positional tagging for m-layer and dependency relations for a-layers. Finally, we discuss some of the issues in treebank development for Tamil.