Bermet Chontaeva


2024

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Strategies for the Annotation of Pronominalised Locatives in Turkic Universal Dependency Treebanks
Jonathan Washington | Çağrı Çöltekin | Furkan Akkurt | Bermet Chontaeva | Soudabeh Eslami | Gulnura Jumalieva | Aida Kasieva | Aslı Kuzgun | Büşra Marşan | Chihiro Taguchi
Proceedings of the Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Universal Dependencies (MWE-UD) @ LREC-COLING 2024

As part of our efforts to develop unified Universal Dependencies (UD) guidelines for Turkic languages, we evaluate multiple approaches to a difficult morphosyntactic phenomenon, pronominal locative expressions formed by a suffix -ki. These forms result in multiple syntactic words, with potentially conflicting morphological features, and participating in different dependency relations. We describe multiple approaches to the problem in current (and upcoming) Turkic UD treebanks, and show that none of them offers a solution that satisfies a number of constraints we consider (including constraints imposed by UD guidelines). This calls for a compromise with the ‘least damage’ that should be adopted by most, if not all, Turkic treebanks. Our discussion of the phenomenon and various annotation approaches may also help treebanking efforts for other languages or language families with similar constructions.