Alexey Koshevoy


2023

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Building a Universal Dependencies Treebank for a Polysynthetic Language: the Case of Abaza
Alexey Koshevoy | Anastasia Panova | Ilya Makarchuk
Proceedings of the Sixth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, GURT/SyntaxFest 2023)

In this paper, we discuss the challenges that we faced during the construction of a Universal Dependencies treebank for Abaza, a polysynthetic Northwest Caucasian language. We propose an alternative to the morpheme-level annotation of polysynthetic languages introduced in Park et al. (2021). Our approach aims at reducing the number of morphological features, yet providing all the necessary information for the comprehensive representation of all the syntactic relations. Besides, we suggest to add one language-specific relation needed for annotating repetitions in spoken texts and present several solutions that aim at increasing cross-linguistic comparability of our data.