Expanding Universal Dependencies for Polysynthetic Languages: A Case of St. Lawrence Island Yupik
Expanding Universal Dependencies for Polysynthetic Languages: A Case of St. Lawrence Island Yupik
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DOI：
10.18653/v1/2021.americasnlp-1.14
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发表时间：
2021-06
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通讯作者：
Hyunji Hayley Park;Lane Schwartz;Francis M. Tyers
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作者：
Hyunji Hayley Park;Lane Schwartz;Francis M. Tyers
本文描述了白令海峡地区使用的濒危语言圣劳伦斯岛尤皮克语的第一个普遍依赖(UD)树库的发展。虽然UD指南为我们的注释提供了一个一般框架，但由于多元合成语言的丰富词法，特定于语言的决定是必要的。最值得注意的是，我们在语素级别和单词级别对语料库进行了注释。语素水平的注释是使用现有的形态分析器和手动消除歧义进行的。通过对两种标注方案的比较，我们认为语素级别的标注对于像圣劳伦斯岛尤皮克这样的多合成语言是必不可少的。词级标注会导致一些Yupik句子产生退化树，并且往往无法捕捉到可以在语素层面表现出来的句法关系。依存分析实验为语素级标注提供了进一步的支持。讨论了对其他多合成语言的UD标注的启示。
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.