ilsp / UD_Greek-Lesbian

🏛️ UD Greek-Lesbian Dialect Treebank

The Lesbos dialect belongs to the Northern Modern Greek group, characterized by distinctive phonological features collectively known as Northern vocalism .
This dataset represents the first Universal Dependencies treebank for a Northern Greek dialect, offering valuable insights into the structure and vitality of Lesbian Greek.

🗣️ Linguistic Background

The Lesbos dialect exhibits the following hallmark phonological features:

• Raising of unstressed mid vowels /e/ → [i] and /o/ → [u]
  e.g., πιδί [piˈði] instead of SMG παιδί [peˈði] “child”
  κάτου [ˈkatu] instead of SMG κάτω [ˈkato] “down”

• Deletion of unstressed high vowels /i/, /u/
  e.g., φίδ [ˈfið] instead of SMG φίδι [ˈfiði] “snake”
  βνό [ˈvno] instead of SMG βουνό [vuˈno] “mountain”

These features distinguish Lesbian Greek from southern dialects, including Standard Modern Greek (SMG) .
Historically, the dialect has been shaped by extensive contact with Venetian (1355–1462) and Turkish (1462–1912), resulting in numerous loanwords and morphological borrowings .
Unlike many Modern Greek dialects, Lesbian Greek remains a living variety , actively spoken across the island.

📚 Dataset Summary

This resource contains:

• 270 sentences
• 3,603 tokens
• Follows Universal Dependencies v2 annotations

It includes morphological, syntactic, and lemmatization layers, aligning with the UD schema .

📊 Model Performance

Citation

To cite this work or read more about the training pipeline, see:

Stavros Bompolas, Stella Markantonatou, Angela Ralli, and Antonios Anastasopoulos. (2025). Crossing Dialectal Boundaries: Building a Treebank for the Dialect of Lesbos through Knowledge Transfer from Standard Modern Greek. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2025), Ljubljana, Slovenia. Association for Computational Linguistics.