The Forest Lion and the Bull: Morphosyntactic Annotation of the Panchatantra

Abstract

We present the first freely available dependency treebank of Sanskrit. It is based on text from Panchatantra, an ancient Indian collection of fables. The annotation scheme we chose is that of Universal Dependencies, a current de-facto standard for cross-linguistically comparable morphological and syntactic annotation. In the present paper, we discuss word segmentation issues, morphological inventory and certain interesting syntactic constructions in the light of the Universal Dependencies guidelines. We also present an initial parsing experiment.