Universal Dependencies for Ainu
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)
Abstract
This paper reports an on-going effort to create a dependency tree bank for the Ainu language in the scheme of Universal Dependencies (UD). The task is crucial both language-internally (language revitalization) and language-externally (providing sources for new features and insights to UD). Since the language shows many of the representative phenomena of a type of languages called polysynthetic languages, an annotation schema to Ainu can be used as a basis to extend the current specification of UD. Our language resource comprises an annotation guideline, dependency bank based on UD, and a mini-lexicon. Although the size of the dependency bank will be small and contain only around 10,000 word tokens, it can serve as a base annotation for the next step. Our mini-lexicon is encoded under the W3C OntoLex specification with UD and UniMorph (UM) features with the system-friendly JSON-LD format and thus bearable to future extensions. We also provide a brief description of dependency relations and local features used in the bank such as pronominal cross-indexing and alienability.