Qizhen Yang


2025

This paper introduces ShUD, the first Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank for Shanghainese, a Wu Chinese variant spoken by approximately 14 million people but severely under-resourced in NLP. The treebank is built through a scalable annotation pipeline that exploits grammatical parallels between Shanghainese and Mandarin. Our pipeline also provides a practical strategy for bootstrapping resources for other Chinese dialects. We documented syntactic phenomena unique to Shanghainese within the UD framework and fine-tuned a dependency parser using our annotated treebank, contributing a foundation to both NLP tool development and cross-linguistic syntactic research.