Old Tibetan Corpus

Here you will find linguistically analyzed Old Tibetan documents as well as tools for processing Old Tibetan text. We have taken these documents directly from the Old Tibetan Documents Online project.

The Old Tibetan Annals and the Old Tibetan Chronicle were given a lot of love and care as they passed through these stages of analysis:

1. First, the Wylie transliteration from OTDO was converted to Unicode Tibetan text.
2. Next, this plain Unicode text was converted to VISL CG format using regular expressions, with each Tibetan "syllable" counting as a VISL CG word form.
3. The ot2ct constraint grammar was applied to the VISL CG input with the --trace flag enabled. This grammar eliminates the orthographic peculiarities of Old Tibetan, making it more similar to Classical Tibetan text.
4. The normalized text was then automatically word segmented and part-of-speech tagged using a tagger trained on Classical Tibetan materials.
5. The tagged text was converted to BRAT standoff format for manual annotation.
6. In BRAT, incorrect segmentations and POS-tags were manually corrected. In addition, verb-argument and some other linguistic dependencies were annotated.
7. The text was then exported from BRAT standoff format to CONLLU format. As part of this process, the text was "denormalized" back to its original Old Tibetan orthographic practice using the debugging information output by the --trace flag.

In the case of the Old Tibetan Annals, we copied the English translation of the text from The Old Tibetan Annals: An Annotated Translation of Tibet's First History by Brandon Dotson, and aligned this translation to the Tibetan text. You can see this in the CONLLU file for the text.

The archive directory contains files in legacy or unmaintained formats.

You may cite this work by referencing this repository and its authors: Christian Faggionato, Edward Garrett, and Marieke Meelen. We thank the AHRC for its funding of the project Lexicography in Motion (2017-2020, PI Ulrich Pagel).

Here is some metadata about the collection.