Strategies for the Annotation of Pronominalised Locatives in Turkic Universal Dependency Treebanks
By Jonathan Washington, Çağrı Çöltekin, Furkan Akkurt, Bermet Chontaeva, Soudabeh Eslami, G. Jumalieva, A. Kasieva, Aslı Kuzgun, Büsra Marsan, Chihiro Taguchi. Workshop on Multiword Expressions, 2024
4 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Language and Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics & Semantics
View Paper: https://doi.org/10.63317/24qtqs6833gu
Citations in the corpus
- The Annotation of Multiword Predicates in Kyrgyz Universal Dependencies (2026, unknown): “The issues of annotating such constructions have been addressed by the UD Turkic working group while considering the annotation of pronominalised locatives [1], of the copular verbs ER and BOL [2], and of the negative element in non-verbal clauses [3].”
- The Annotation of Turkic Copula Verbs in UD (2025, unknown): “This paper represents the work of a subgroup within the UD Turkic group focusing on the annotation of copulas in Turkic treebanks, following earlier work on the suffix -ki [17].”
- Construction and educational application of a linguistically grounded dependency treebank for Uyghur (2025, unknown): “Variations in annotating complex constructions, such as post-verbal auxiliaries and pronominalized locatives, hinder the effectiveness of cross-lingual transfer and the development of reliable tools (Akhundjanova, 2025; Washington et al., 2024).”
- Parallel Universal Dependencies Treebanks for Turkic Languages (2025, unknown): “Some of these issues were addressed in the recent work, such as pronominalized locatives (Washington et al., 2024) and postverbial constructions (Akhundjanova, 2025).”