Developing a Universal Dependencies Treebank for Alaskan Gwich’in

Matthew Kirk Andrews, Cagri Coltekin


Abstract
This paper presents a Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank of Gwich’in, a severely endangered Athabascan language. The treebank, developed using instructional materials and dictionaries, includes 313 annotated sentences. This paper discusses the methodology used to construct the treebank, the linguistic challenges faced, and the implications of annotating a polysynthetic, morphologically complex language within the Universal Dependencies framework. The treebank was released with UD version 2.15 and available at https://github.com/UniversalDependencies/UD_Gwichin-TueCL/.
Anthology ID:
2025.udw-1.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2025)
Month:
August
Year:
2025
Address:
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Editors:
Gosse Bomma, Çağrı Çöltekin
Venues:
UDW | WS | SyntaxFest
SIG:
SIGPARSE
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
164–173
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.udw-1.18/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matthew Kirk Andrews and Cagri Coltekin. 2025. Developing a Universal Dependencies Treebank for Alaskan Gwich’in. In Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2025), pages 164–173, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Developing a Universal Dependencies Treebank for Alaskan Gwich’in (Andrews & Coltekin, UDW-SyntaxFest 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.udw-1.18.pdf