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Universal Dependencies for Saraiki

Summary

Saraiki is an Indo-Aryan language of Pakistan spoken by about 25 million people. Until now it had no syntactically annotated corpus, and none of the less-studied Indo-Aryan languages were represented in UD. The authors create the first Saraiki treebank following the Universal Dependencies scheme. The sentences come from three sources: the Common Voice corpus, the newspaper Jhok, and examples constructed while discussing annotation decisions. A native speaker annotated the corpus manually in two stages. First, he tagged parts of speech (UPOS only, since there is no established tagset for Saraiki). He then annotated dependencies in the Annotatrix tool, consulting the co-authors and UD experts. Most of the paper explains how to represent features of Saraiki in UD: reduplication and other compounds, light-verb and serial-verb constructions, split ergativity, and different types of relative clauses. The resource is still small, but it is the first of its kind. It offers a model of annotation decisions for related languages of the region and a basis for parsers and other NLP tools for Saraiki.

Key points

  • Size: 587 sentences and 7,597 tokens. The corpus will be added to the UD repository once it reaches 1,000 sentences.
  • All UPOS tags occur in the corpus. The most frequent are NOUN (17.3%) and VERB (16.2%). The XPOS field has not been filled in yet.
  • Key annotation decisions:
    • reduplication is labeled compound:redup, with the first element as the head;
    • noun compounds (maa'n + piyo, "parents") and the reflexive pronoun apnre + aap are linked with compound;
    • relative pronouns are tagged PRON or DET depending on their function;
    • infinitives are always tagged VERB, as in the Punjabi treebank.
  • Morphological features are to be annotated automatically using the Apertium analyzer for Saraiki (Alam et al., 2023).
  • In future work, the authors plan to train a syntactic parser and test zero-shot transfer to Punjabi (Shahmukhi), Hindko, and Khetrani. The paper reports no parsing results (including LAS).

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

Topics: Universal Dependencies · Treebanks

Cited by

1 paper of our library cites it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); each has a page here.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{alam2024universal,
  title = {{Universal Dependencies for Saraiki}},
  author = {Alam, Meesum and Tyers, Francis and Hanink, Emily and Kübler, Sandra},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Universal Dependencies (MWE-UD) @ LREC-COLING 2024},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.63317/4nhqa64ghm55},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/4nhqa64ghm55}
}

References

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