Developing a U niversal D ependencies Treebank for Alaskan Gwich’in (2025)

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/.

## introduction we present a treebank of gwich'in annotated following the universal dependencies framework @xcite . to our knowledge, this is the first treebank of the athabascan language family, a language family spread over a large part of north america. recent efforts in the universal dependencies community have increased coverage of the world's languages substantially. as of the most recent data release, there are 319 treebanks of 179 different languages from 62 different language groups @xcite . however, excluding the present effort, only one language indigenous to the united states or canada is included in the database. despite the growing interest in universal dependencies and in the development of tools and resources for low-resource languages among the nlp-community, languages from this linguistically diverse region of the world remain underrepresented among ud treebanks. since the early 1990s, linguists have been concerned with the issue of language endangerment. athabaskanist michael e. krauss was one of the first to address this problem in his classic article "the world's languages in crisis", in which he compared the loss of linguistic diversity to the loss of biodiversity @xcite . in order to draw global attention to the critical situation of language endangerment, the united nations general assembly has declared the period between 2022 and 2032 the international decade of indigenous languages (united nations general assembly, 2019). inline with this spirit and in the spirit of the universal dependencies project's commitment to linguistic diversity we present a small manually annotated treebank for gwich'in, a critically endangered language with interesting linguistic properties, including polysynthesis and classificatory verbs. following an introduction of the gwich'in language, this paper will present and discuss the methodology used and some of the linguistic challenges faced in the development of this treebank. ## background gwich'in is an indigenous language of north america spoken by the gwich'in people, also know as dinjii zhuh, who live in what is now the us state of alaska, yukon and the northwest territory in canada. historically, all dinjii zhuh n ąi ˛i ˛could speak their language, dinjii zhuh k'yàa, but today, no more than 300 of the 4000 dinjii zhuh n ąi ˛i can, most of whom are elders @xcite . due to colonial pressure on the dinjii zhuh n ąi ˛i ˛and other indigenous peoples to give up their native tongues, parents are no longer able to speak dinjii zhuh ginjìk to their tr'iinin n ąi ˛i ˛('children') at home. despite these challenges, there is a vibrant gwich'in community interested in learning and revitalizing their language. currently, gwich'in is taught as a course at the university of alaska-fairbanks and in some k-12 schools in canada. in recent years, some language learning products have also been developed, including books (gwich'in social and cultural institute, n.d.a), online dictionaries (gwich'in social and cultural in-stitute, n.d.b), apps, a language learning platform (doyon foundation, n.d.), and gwich'in language episodes of the emmy award winning pbs kids show "molly of denali" whose main character molly is part gwich'in athabascan. besides these few resources, there is very little documentation and description of the gwich'in language. the vast majority of data and information on the language consists of scans of handwritten field notes, classroom worksheets, and unannotated audio recordings housed in the alaska native language archive (alaska native language archive, n.d.). from the perspective of a computational linguist, these resources in their current form are difficult to use for the development of language technology or a so-called "nlp-toolkit" @xcite . in addition, few academic works have been published on the linguistic aspects of the gwich'in language. publications on neighboring athabascan languages such as koyukon and upper tanana are much easier to find @xcite @xcite . moreover, the majority of research on these languages and on athabascan in general has focused more on the rich morphology of the language, particularly the verbal morphology, than on any other area of linguistic study. to date, the syntactic structure of athabascan has received far less attention. the present study hopes to address these gaps. approach at a minimum, sentences in gwich'in consist of a single morphologically complex verb form. a verb form consists of a verb stem, a subject prefix belonging to one of four classifiers, and zero or more inflectional and derivational prefixes. verb stems are encoded for tense/aspect, and subject prefixes must agree in person and number as well as with the verb stem's classifier and tense/aspect. information on a word's part of speech and lemma or dictionary form were annotated as were basic dependency relations between words. english translations, morpheme segmentation, and detailed interlinear glosses were included as well. the annotation tool ud annotatrix @xcite was used to streamline annotations as was a gwich'in dictionary web application developed by the first author to help determine word lemmas. corpus the treebank consists of a total of 313 annotated sentences. approximately two-thirds of the corpus consists of one-to two-word sentences highlighting several different verb paradigms with a verb in the imperfective, perfective, and future tenses and zero or one noun objects. the remainder of the corpus consists of longer, more complex multi-word sentences covering a majority of partof speech tags and dependency relations of the universal dependencies framework. language-specific features foot_0 include the feature classifier and its values ø, l, ł, and d (see appendix a for the descriptions). the name for this feature and its values are consistent with the athabascan literature. a gwich'in verb stem takes one of these four classifiers, each of which has its own set of subject prefixes. compare the verb yahtsii 'he or she is making it' which has the verb stem -tsii and the subject prefix -ah-with the verb yitsii 'he or she is caching it' which has the same stem but takes the subject prefix -i-. the verb stems are the same, but the third-person subject prefixes are different as these verbs have different classifiers. the language-specific feature stemclass and its values are shown in appendix a. this feature is used to account for the noun class to which a gwich'in classificatory verb stem belongs. this and other language-specific challenges are covered in the next section. a note on tone gwich'in is a tonal language. low-tone, rising-falling, and falling-rising are marked. there is much inconsistency of the marking of tone among the sources referenced in the creation of this treebank. some sources mark tone, while others do not. sentences in this treebank are transcribed exactly as they appear in the source text. as such, the same word may appear different elsewhere in the treebank although it is not, one with tone marking and one without. ## conclusion, limitations and future work the development of the ud_gwichin-tuecl treebank is an important step towards expanding the representation of diverse languages in the universal dependencies framework. however, several limitations need to be acknowledged. first, the corpus is relatively small, with only 313 annotated sentences. this may limit the scope of syntactic and morphological phenomena represented in the treebank. while we attempted to ch'at'oh zhìt dats'an ghòo łyâa nitsii . ch'at'oh zhìt dats'an ghòo łyâa nï-tsii . nest inside duck egg really 3sg.ipfv.stat.ø-big . noun adp noun noun adv verb punct nmod case compound nsubj advmod punct root 'the duck eggs in the nest are really big.' figure 6: postposition zhit 'inside' with inanimate object. mary vizhìt gwìłts'ìk . mary vï-zhìt gwï-ił-ts'ik . mary 3sg.poss-inside ar-cnj+3sg.ipfv.stat.ł-sick . propn adp verb punct obl case punct root 'mary is hungry.' figure 7: postposition zhit 'inside' with human object. daatsoo dizheh gwizhìt dhidii . daatsoo dï-zheh gwï-zhìt dhï-ï-dii . mouse refl.poss-house ar-inside cnj-3sg.ipfv.stat.ø-sit . noun noun adp verb punct nsubj obl case punct root 'mouse is inside her house.' figure 8: postposition zhit 'inside' with animate (non-human) object. neego ˛o ˛vizhìt gwiłts'ik . neego ˛o ˛vï-zhìt gwï-ił-ts'ik . fox 3sg.poss-inside ar-cnj+3sg.ipfv.stat.ł-sick . noun adp verb punct obl case punct root 'fox is hungry.' figure 9: human-form of postposition used with non-human object because of personification. vizhìt gwìłts'ik . vï-zhìt gwï-ił-ts'ik . 3sg.poss-inside ar-cnj+3sg.ipfv.stat.ł-sick . adp verb punct obl punct root 's/he is hungry.' figure 10: postposition is promoted due to 'elided' noun phrase object. third, the present treebank was annotated by a non-native second language learner of gwich'in. while every effort was made to ensure accurate annotations, the absence of native speakers in the construction of the treebank may result in inaccuracies and incomplete representations of the language. furthermore, annotation decisions are those of a single annotator. therefore, inter-rater agreement scores cannot be obtained at this time. future work on the language will benefit from collaboration with native speaker consultants as well as additional annotators. this treebank was developed to contribute to the universal dependencies project as well as the study of athabascan morphology and syntax. we also hope that it will be instrumental for the gwich'in community in their efforts to develop tools that support language revitalization. it is also hoped that this treebank will not only engender interest in athabascan languages and north american indian languages more broadly in the field of natural language processing, but also that athabascanists and others working with endangered languages will be encouraged to contribute more treebanks to the universal dependencies project in the future.