Apurin\~a Universal Dependencies Treebank

TL;DR

This paper introduces the first Universal Dependencies treebank for the Apurinã language, providing foundational linguistic resources and infrastructure for an endangered Amazonian language.

Contribution

It presents a novel annotated treebank for Apurinã, including unique features and a finite-state description, supporting language preservation and computational analysis.

Findings

First annotated treebank for Apurinã language

Includes 14 parts-of-speech and 7 new features

Facilitates language preservation and computational tools

Abstract

This paper presents and discusses the first Universal Dependencies treebank for the Apurin\~a language. The treebank contains 76 fully annotated sentences, applies 14 parts-of-speech, as well as seven augmented or new features - some of which are unique to Apurin\~a. The construction of the treebank has also served as an opportunity to develop finite-state description of the language and facilitate the transfer of open-source infrastructure possibilities to an endangered language of the Amazon. The source materials used in the initial treebank represent fieldwork practices where not all tokens of all sentences are equally annotated. For this reason, establishing regular annotation practices for the entire Apurin\~a treebank is an ongoing project.