The Persian Dependency Treebank Made Universal

We describe an automatic method for converting the Persian Dependency Treebank (Rasooli et al, 2013) to Universal Dependencies. This treebank contains 29107 sentences. Our experiments along with manual linguistic analysis show that our data is more compatible with Universal Dependencies than the Uppsala Persian Universal Dependency Treebank (Seraji et al., 2016), and is larger in size and more diverse in vocabulary. Our data brings in a labeled attachment F-score of 85.2 in supervised parsing. Our delexicalized Persian-to-English parser transfer experiments show that a parsing model trained on our data is ~2% absolutely more accurate than that of Seraji et al. (2016) in terms of labeled attachment score.