Gabriel H. Gilbert
2025
Crosslingual Dependency Parsing of Hawaiian and Cook Islands Māori using Universal Dependencies
Gabriel H. Gilbert
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Rolando Coto-Solanu
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Sally Akevai Nicholas
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Lauren Houchens
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Sabrina Barton
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Trinity Pryor
Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Parsing Technologies (IWPT, SyntaxFest 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.