A Morpho-Syntactically Annotated Corpus of Ògè Folk Narratives with a Focus on Nominal Structure

Priscilla Adenuga


Abstract
This paper presents a manually annotated morpho-syntactic corpus of Ògè, an under-resourced indigenous language spoken in Nigeria. The corpus consists of ten folk narratives (approximately 4,667 tokens) collected for the investigation of nominal structure. Annotation is expert-driven and includes token-level part-of-speech tagging together with a structured Determiner Phrase (DP) classification framework designed to capture language-specific nominal configurations. The scheme distinguishes between bare nouns and modified noun phrases, reflecting a central structural property of Ògè: noun forms remain morphologically stable across contexts, while modifiers exhibit formal and positional variation contributing to reference, specificity, and discourse prominence. The DP classification layer encodes both simple and complex nominal constructions, enabling systematic analysis of internal phrase structure. Designed as a reusable digital resource, the corpus supports morphosyntactic tagging, noun phrase boundary detection, and modeling of nominal structure in low-resource NLP settings. The annotated dataset will be made publicly available through the SADiLaR repository. This work demonstrates how descriptive linguistic analysis can inform annotation design and provides a replicable framework for developing structured resources for under-resourced African languages. Keywords: Ògè, low-resource NLP, annotated corpus, nominal structure, African languages
Anthology ID:
2026.rail-1.1
Volume:
Proceedings of Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) 2026 @ LREC 2026
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma, Mallorca (Spain)
Editors:
Muzi Matfunjwa, Mmasibidi Setaka, Rooweither Mabuya, Menno van Zaanen
Venues:
RAIL | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
1–6
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-rail-01
DOI:
10.63317/22aco7jqqkan
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Priscilla Adenuga. 2026. A Morpho-Syntactically Annotated Corpus of Ògè Folk Narratives with a Focus on Nominal Structure. In Proceedings of Resources for African Indigenous Languages (RAIL) 2026 @ LREC 2026, pages 1–6, Palma, Mallorca (Spain). ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Morpho-Syntactically Annotated Corpus of Ògè Folk Narratives with a Focus on Nominal Structure (Adenuga, RAIL 2026)
Copy Citation: