Trinity Pryor


2025

This paper presents the first Universal Dependency (UD) treebank for ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian). We discuss some of the difficulties in describing Hawaiian grammar using UD, and train models for automatic parsing. We also combined this data with UD parses from another Eastern Polynesian language, Cook Islands Māori, to train a crosslingual Polynesian parser using UDPipe2. The crosslingual parser produced a statistically significant improvement of 2.4% in the labeled attachment score (LAS) when parsing Hawaiian, and this improvement didn’t produce a negative impact in the LAS of Cook Islands Māori. We will use this parser to accelerate the linguistic documentation of Hawaiian.