Old Permic Universal Dependencies Treebank

Abstract

Old Permic, also known as Old Komi, is an extinct variety of Komi that was spoken in the late Middle Ages in the lower Vychegda river basin in Northeastern European Russia, in an area that currently is not Komi-speaking. This language variety is attested in fragmentary records from the 14th to 17th century written both in the Old Permic alphabet and in Cyrillic. These records are of significant importance for research on the history of the Komi language. Here we introduce our attempt towards a new Universal Dependencies treebank that will eventually contain the existing corpus of Old Permic in a structured and CoNLL-U annotated format. This will be the first time this material is being made openly available in digital format, and our contribution describes the current state of the art and remaining challenges.