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.
@InProceedings{SENUMA18.1034, author = {Hajime Senuma and Akiko Aizawa}, title = "{Universal Dependencies for Ainu}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper