U niversal D ependency Treebank for a low-resource Dardic Language: T orwali (2025)

Abstract: This paper presents and discusses the linguistic phenomena encountered in the development of the ongoing first ever universal dependency treebank for Torwali the Language. Torwali belongs to the Kohistani sub-group of Dardic Indo-Aryan languages, and is considered an endangered (Moseley, 2010) and indigenous language, which makes it extremely low-resourced in terms of linguistic and computational resources. With the aim of including Torwali in Universal Dependencies (UD) (de Marneffe et al. 2021), we are annotating a diverse set of example sentences for POS tags, features and dependency relations.

## introduction northern pakistan is characterized as one of the most linguistically diverse regions with around 30 indigenous language communities @xcite , among which many are endangered languages. torwali is one of such communities, located in swat kohistan, which belongs to the kohistani sub-group of the dardic indo-aryan languages @xcite . it has two dialects (the bahrain and chail dialects), with a total of over 100,000 speakers approximately. torwali [iso 639-3: trw], is a marginalized and low-resource language written in right-to-left perso-arabic script. there is a glossonymic variation between torwalik @xcite , torwali @xcite , kohistani @xcite and torwali-kohistani @xcite ) across time, literature and communities. there are some resources of torwali language description @xcite , a study of linguistic features @xcite and a structured lexical database @xcite . but, when it comes to resources for computational processing of torwali, there is a lack of robust resources of morphology and grammar. ud treebank data is useful for downstream tasks in nlp, including semantic parsing @xcite and natural language understanding @xcite , and syntactic corpora are useful for linguists studying language typology and change @xcite . as there is no coverage in ud to date for dardic languages, this work upon completion and inclusion in ud, will help in creation of treebanks for other dardic languages as well, and will help mitigate the bias towards the "big" indo-european languages @xcite ) in the ud. this paper discusses the approach to build a torwali dependency treebank as well as syntactic constructions and grammatical structure of an extremely low-resourced and less-studied language. the treebank is currently under development with a target to cover 500 sentences taken from inam ullah's torwali-english-urdu dictionary. ## data collection and annotation the data for this study was extracted from the lexical database of torwali in toolbox format created by inam ullah @xcite , which encodes linguistic information using tagged field markers. only example sentences were extracted, as they provide naturalistic usage data for lexical items in context. a custom script was developed to parse the toolbox file and isolate fields containing example sentences, while discarding other lexical metadata. minor formatting inconsistencies, such as irregular punctuation or spacing, were corrected to ensure uniformity across sentences. after preprocessing, the extracted sentences were converted into the conll-u format, which consists of a structured 10-column format designed to facilitate manual annotation. this format enables the inclusion of tokenization, morphological features, and syntactic ## morphology torwali has a complex morphology because it is basically a fusional language which uses several strategies like stem modification, reduplication and existence of words in inflected form, derived form, compound form and root form. in torwali, nouns are inflected for number and case and the stem can be joined by an optional plural suffix and an optional oblique case marker. torwali uses several strategies to mark plurality, but the primary morphological method is tone along with verb agreement like for most of the singular nouns have a tone with rising pitch from low-to-high and their plural counterparts have a tone with low pitch. torwali verbs inflect for tense, aspect, mood and gender and most of the verb forms make gender and number distinction only, no distinction for person. torwali has three tenses: present, past and future. we did not record any distinction between simple present and present continuous tense in torwali. it also encodes elevation in motion verbs, distinguishing 'going up' and 'going down' based on real altitude. this reflects the speakers' mountainous environment, with multiple verbs (e.g., ‫/واد‬wad/came down-went down/, and ‫/اوگھاد‬ughād/came up-went up) conveying nuanced direction, though all translate as 'go' or 'come' in english.