# Dependency Annotation of Ottoman Turkish with Multilingual BERT

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.14743 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14743/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Towards Making the Most of BERT in Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05672/) (2019)
- [Generate, Annotate, and Learn: NLP with Synthetic Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06168/) (2021)
- [Applying Occam's Razor to Transformer-Based Dependency Parsing: What Works, What Doesn't, and What is Really Necessary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12699/) (2020)
- [Resources for Turkish Dependency Parsing: Introducing the BOUN Treebank and the BoAT Annotation Tool](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10416/) (2020)
- [Iterative Pseudo-Labeling with Deep Feature Annotation and Confidence-Based Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.02717/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [SindBERT, the Sailor: Charting the Seas of Turkish NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.21364/) (2025)
- [TurkicNLP: An NLP Toolkit for Turkic Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.19174/) (2026)
- [Building Foundations for Natural Language Processing of Historical Turkish: Resources and Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04828/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This study introduces a pretrained large language model-based annotation methodology for the first de dency treebank in Ottoman Turkish. Our experimental results show that, iteratively, i) pseudo-annotating data using a multilingual BERT-based parsing model, ii) manually correcting the pseudo-annotations, and iii) fine-tuning the parsing model with the corrected annotations, we speed up and simplify the challenging dependency annotation process. The resulting treebank, that will be a part of the Universal Dependencies (UD) project, will facilitate automated analysis of Ottoman Turkish documents, unlocking the linguistic richness embedded in this historical heritage.