U niversal D ependencies Treebank for K hoekhoe ( KDT ) (2025)

Abstract: This paper reports on the development of the first dependency treebank for Khoekhoe (KDT). Khoekhoe (Khoe-Kwadi, Namibia) is a low-resource language with few linguistic and computational resources available publicly. This treebank consists of 29k words across six texts taken from various registers. It includes a substantial portion of spoken conversational data. These sentences were annotated manually according to the Universal Dependencies framework. In this paper, apart from presenting the strategies that have been followed to create the treebank, we also discussed some challenging morphological features and syntactic constructions found in the corpus and outlined how we have handled them using the current Universal Dependencies specification.

## introduction universal dependencies (ud) is a crosslinguistically consistent framework for annotating various aspects of morphosyntax @xcite @xcite . it provides a set of guidelines that enable comparison between treebanks across diverse linguistic typologies. this paper reports the development of the khoekhoe dependency treebank (kdt) a ud treebank for khoekhoe, a khoe-kwadi language spoken primarily in namibia. the treebank has been released as ud_khoekhoe-kdt, an official universal dependencies (ud) treebank, available at https://universaldependencies.org/ treebanks/naq_kdt/ under the cc by-sa 4.0 license. this represents the first ud treebank not only for this language family but also for any of the so-called khoisan languages, a group of about a dozen languages of southern africa characterized by an extensive use of click consonants in their phonology @xcite . the annotation process highlighted several morphosyntactic properties of khoekhoe that required careful consideration within the ud framework. these include the treatment of mood particles, valency-changing suffixes (e.g. applicative, reflexive), the use of nominalization as a clausal embedding strategy, and reported speech constructions involving quotative particles. in each case, we propose ud-compliant solutions and, where appropriate, introduce new feature values or relation subtypes. ## khoekhoe khoekhoe (iso 639-3: naq; glottocode: nama1264), also known as nama-damara, is a khoe language of the khoe-kwadi family (güldemann, 2014). it is spoken mainly in central and southern namibia. khoekhoe represents a dialect continuum @xcite , it includes the northern varieties of hai{om and { ākhoe, which differ considerably from the central and southern varieties. this paper is based on the corpus which includes only the latter varieties, which are closer to what is considered as standardized khoekhoe. with approximately 245,000 speakers (11.8% of the total population of namibia), khoekhoe is the second most spoken language in the country after oshiwambo @xcite . although khoekhoe is well-documented and receives official recognition as a language of instruction in namibia's educational system @xcite , and despite being the largest non-bantu click language in africa, @xcite consider it to be an 'endangered language'. the majority of khoekhoe speakers are multilingual: many possess at least a functional proficiency in afrikaans, with english fluency steadily increasing since namibia's independence @xcite . consequently, code-switching and word borrowing from afrikaans and english to khoe-khoe are very frequent. ## corpus the khoekhoe corpus used for the treebank currently contains approximately 29k words across six texts. the selection was primarily determined by practical considerations (availability and need of interlinear glossed texts for other research purposes). we balanced the corpus to include texts from multiple modes and genres. currently, the corpus is skewed towards translated texts. we plan to expand its original spoken and written component in later releases. one text (5.5k words) is a transcription of a conversation in khoekhoe between two friends. it was transcribed and translated into english by native speakers, then supplemented with interlinear morphosyntactic glosses in elan (max planck institute for psycholinguistics, 2024). all the sentences containing personal information that could identify the speakers were removed. the remaining sentences were shuffled to ensure further anonymization. all the other five texts are written. they include translations of the cairo cicling corpus foot_0 (215 words) and the bivaltyp dataset @xcite ) (750 words); subtitles of the films bridge of spies (2015) (14k words) and a section of titanic (1997) (6k words) translated from english by a native speaker; and chapters from the schoolbook khomai da ra i (1971) with sentences shuffled (2k words). also these texts were supplemented with interlinear morphosyntactic glosses in elan (max planck institute for psycholinguistics, 2024). ## methodology and overview the treebank annotations were performed manually by the first author on the basis interlinear morphosyntactic glosses. we plan to cross-check the annotations in the future versions of the treebank. ambiguous structures were resolved through consensus among all authors. for the first 60 sentences (330 tokens), a script was created for tokenization and conversion of interlinear morphosyntactic glosses into conll-u format. this annotated sample was then used to train a udpipe 1 @xcite pipeline. this pipeline was subsequently applied to parse the next batch of sentences. the parsed sentences were manually reviewed, and this process was repeated iteratively until the entire corpus was annotated. udpipe 1 was selected over ud-pipe 2 @xcite for this process because it is more user-friendly, and any potential differences in annotation quality would become negligible after manual review. annotation guidelines were developed alongside the annotation process, with all newly encountered issues being addressed before proceeding with the next batch. of the 17 universal part-of-speech tags recognized by the ud framework, only sym is not currently used in the kdt treebank. ## conclusion the khoekhoe treebank presented in this paper is the first case of a khoisan language added to ud. khoekhoe has a range of typologically common mood and grammatical voice features so far underrepresented in ud treebanks. we furthermore present several solutions to issues present primarily in corpora of spontaneous spoken language, such as false starts.