UD-ETCSUX: Toward a Better Understanding of Sumerian Syntax

AbstractBeginning with the discovery of the cuneiform writing system in 1835, there have been numerous grammars published illustrating the complexities of the Sumerian language. However, the one thing they have in common is their omission of dependency rules for syntax in Sumerian linguistics. For this reason we are working toward a better understanding of Sumerian syntax, by means of dependency-grammar in the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework. Therefore, in this study we articulate the methods and engineering techniques that can address the hardships in annotating dependency relationships in the Sumerian texts in transliteration from the Electronic Text Corpora of Sumerian (ETCSUX). Our code can be found at https://github.com/ancient-world-citation-analysis/UD-ETCSUX.