We introduce the first fully aligned and manually annotated parallel Universal Dependencies (UD) treebanks for four Turkic languages: Azerbaijani, Kyrgyz, Turkish, and Uzbek. These resources currently consist of 148 strategically selected sentences that illustrate typologically significant morphosyntactic phenomena across these related yet distinct languages. These parallel treebanks enable systematic comparative studies of Turkic syntax and may be instrumental in cross-lingual NLP applications. All treebanks are available as part of UD v2.16.

As part of our efforts to develop unified Universal Dependencies (UD) guidelines for Turkic languages, we evaluate multiple approaches to a difficult morphosyntactic phenomenon, pronominal locative expressions formed by a suffix -ki. These forms result in multiple syntactic words, with potentially conflicting morphological features, and participating in different dependency relations. We describe multiple approaches to the problem in current (and upcoming) Turkic UD treebanks, and show that none of them offers a solution that satisfies a number of constraints we consider (including constraints imposed by UD guidelines). This calls for a compromise with the ‘least damage’ that should be adopted by most, if not all, Turkic treebanks. Our discussion of the phenomenon and various annotation approaches may also help treebanking efforts for other languages or language families with similar constructions.