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Developing a Universal Dependencies Treebank for Alaskan Gwich'in

Summary

The authors created the first UD treebank for Gwich'in. It is an Athabaskan language of Alaska and northwestern Canada that is endangered: it is spoken by at most 300 people, most of them elderly. Indigenous languages of the USA and Canada are barely represented in UD, and the syntax of Athabaskan languages has been studied much less than their morphology. The data come from the Alaska Native Language Archive: teaching materials from university courses, English–Gwich'in dictionaries and two master's theses with glossed examples. The sentences were annotated manually in UD Annotatrix. The annotation includes parts of speech, lemmas and dependencies, as well as translations, morpheme segmentation and interlinear glosses. The UD_Gwichin-TueCL corpus contains 313 sentences and was published in UD release 2.15. The authors describe the annotation difficulties in detail: the polysynthetic verb with its multi-position prefix template, classificatory verbs, changes of the verb stem depending on tense or aspect, and inconsistent tone marking in the sources. The work matters for two reasons. It is the first resource of the Athabaskan family in UD. It also shows where the UD scheme fails to describe languages in which syntactic relations are expressed inside the verb.

Key points

  • Treebank UD_Gwichin-TueCL: 313 sentences, UD release 2.15, only the Alaskan variety of the language. About two thirds of the corpus are one- or two-word sentences illustrating verb paradigms in the imperfective, perfective and future.
  • The authors call it the first treebank of the Athabaskan family. Before it, UD had only one language indigenous to the USA or Canada, although overall it contains 319 treebanks for 179 languages.
  • Language-specific features Classifier (values Ø, L, Ł, D) and StemClass (the noun class that a classificatory verb refers to) were introduced. Morphological features have not been added yet; they are promised for future releases.
  • Following lexicographic tradition, lemmas are given in the 3rd person singular form. In the corpus, a verb occupies at most seven positions of the prefix template.
  • Limitations: the annotation was done by one person who is learning Gwich'in as a second language, so inter-annotator agreement cannot be assessed. A conceptual problem also remains unresolved: Athabaskanists treat pronominal prefixes as the core arguments of the verb, whereas UD requires arguments to be separate words.

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

Cite

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

@inproceedings{andrews2025developing,
  title = {{Developing a Universal Dependencies Treebank for Alaskan Gwich'in}},
  author = {Andrews, Matthew Kirk and Coltekin, Cagri},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2025)},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.udw-1.18/}
}

References

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