A Surface-Syntactic UD Treebank for Naija
Bernard Caron, Marine Courtin, Kim Gerdes, Sylvain Kahane · 2019
This paper presents a syntactic treebank for spoken Naija, an English pidgincreole, which is rapidly spreading across Nigeria.The syntactic annotation is developed in the Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependency annotation scheme (SUD) (Gerdes et al., 2018) and automatically converted into UD.We present the workflow of the treebank development for this under-resourced language.A crucial step in the syntactic analysis of a spoken language consists in manually adding a markup onto the transcription, indicating the segmentation into major syntactic units and their internal structure.We show that this so-called "macrosyntactic" markup improves parsing results.We also study some iconic syntactic phenomena that clearly distinguish Naija from English.