This article presents empirical evaluations of aspects of annotation for the linguistic property of animacy in Swedish, ranging from manual human annotation, automatic classification and, finally, an external evaluation in the task of syntactic parsing. We show that a treatment of animacy as a lexical semantic property of noun types enables generalization over distributional properties of these nouns which proves beneficial in automatic classification and furthermore gives significant improvements in terms of parsing accuracy for Swedish, compared to a state-of-theart baseline parser with gold standard animacy information. .
