Hell Awaits: Building a Universal Dependencies Treebank for Dante Alighieri’s Comedy

In this paper, we describe the creation of a treebank for Dante’s Comedy in Universal Dependencies, the first syntactically annotated text for Old Italian following a dependency-based paradigm. We detail the phase of treebanking the first part of the Comedy, the Inferno, and we discuss some annotation issues, specifically ellipses and comparative structures. Then, we perform an evaluation of automated dependency parsing with models trained on the currently available annotated portion of the text.