In this paper, we present the Abkhaz National Corpus, a comprehensive and open, grammatically annotated text corpus which makes the Abkhaz language accessible to scientific investigations from various perspectives (linguistics, literary studies, history, political and social sciences etc.). The corpus also serves as a means for the long-term preservation of Abkhaz language documents in digital form, and as a pedagogical tool for language learning. It now comprises more than 10 million words and is continuously being extended. Abkhaz is a lesser-resourced language; prior to this work virtually no computational resources for the language were available. As a member of the West-Caucasian language family, which is characterized by an extremely rich, polysynthetic morphological structure, Abkhaz poses serious challenges to morphosyntactic analysis, the main problem being the high degree of morphological ambiguity. We show how these challenges can be met, and what we plan to further enhance the performance of the analyser.
@InProceedings{MEURER18.548, author = {Paul Meurer}, title = "{The Abkhaz National Corpus}", 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} }
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