Is Old French tougher to parse?

Loïc Grobol, Sophie Prévost, Benoit Crabbé

Abstract:

Medieval French is known to be relatively hard to parse, with several possible sources of confusion
for automatic parsers, among which its flexible word order and its graphical and syntactic vari-
ation, both synchronically and diachronically. In this work, we study in particular the influence
of word order, by comparing the performances of two state-of-the-art syntactic parsers trained
and evaluated on two treebanks: the Syntactic Reference Corpus of Medieval French (SRCMF),
a treebank of Old French (9th—13th century) and the Google Stanford Dependency treebank of
contemporary French