The Perseus Project has recently received a planning grant from the
NSF to investigate the costs and labor involved in constructing a
multimillion-word Latin treebank (a large collection of syntactically
parsed sentences), along with its potential value for the linguistics
and Classics community. While our initial efforts under this grant
will focus on syntactically annotating excerpts from Golden Age
authors (Caesar, Cicero, Vergil) and the Vulgate, a future
multimillion-word corpus would be comprised of writings from the pre-
Classical period up through the Early Modern era. To date we've
annotated a total of 12,000 words in a style that's predominantly
informed by two sources: the dependency grammar used by the Prague
Dependency Treebank (itself based on Mel'cuk 1988), and the Latin
grammar of Pinkster 1990.

While treebanks provide valuable training data for computational
tasks such as grammar induction and automatic syntactic parsing, they
also have the potential to be used in traditional research areas as
well. Large collections of syntactically parsed sentences have the
potential to revolutionize lexicography and philology, as they
provide the immediate context for a word's use along with its typical
syntactic arguments (this lets us chart, for example, how the meaning
of a verb changes as its predominant arguments change). Treebanks
enable large-scale research into structurally-based rhetorical
devices particularly of interest to Classicists (such as hyperbaton)
and they provide the raw data for research in historical linguistics
(such as the move in Latin from classical SOV word order to romance
SVO).

The eventual Latin treebank will be openly available to the public;
we should, therefore, come to a consensus on how it should be built.
To that end we encourage input from the linguistics and Classics
community on the treebank design (including the syntactic
representation of Latin) and welcome contributions by annotators (for
which limited funding is available). Interested collaborators should
contact David Bamman (David.Bamman -AT- tufts.edu) at the Perseus Project.