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Title: Expanding Universal Dependencies for Polysynthetic Languages: A Case of St. Lawrence Island Yupik
This paper describes the development of the first Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank for St. Lawrence Island Yupik, an endangered language spoken in the Bering Strait region. While the UD guidelines provided a general framework for our annotations, language-specific decisions were made necessary by the rich morphology of the polysynthetic language. Most notably, we annotated a corpus at the morpheme level as well as the word level. The morpheme level annotation was conducted using an existing morphological analyzer and manual disambiguation. By comparing the two resulting annotation schemes, we argue that morpheme-level annotation is essential for polysynthetic languages like St. Lawrence Island Yupik. Word-level annotation results in degenerate trees for some Yupik sentences and often fails to capture syntactic relations that can be manifested at the morpheme level. Dependency parsing experiments provide further support for morpheme-level annotation. Implications for UD annotation of other polysynthetic languages are discussed.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1761680
NSF-PAR ID:
10285561
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas
Page Range / eLocation ID:
131-142
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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