U niversal D ependencies Treebank for Standard A lbanian: A New Approach (2024)

Abstract: In this paper, we present a Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank for the Standard Albanian Language (SAL), annotated by expert linguistics supported by information technology professionals. The annotated treebank consists of 24,537 tokens (1,400 sentences) and includes annotation for syntactic dependencies, part-of-speech tags, morphological features, and lemmas. This treebank represents the largest UD treebank available for SAL. In order to overcome annotation challenges in SAL within the UD framework, we delicately balanced the preservation of the richness of SAL grammar while adapting the UD tagset and addressing unique language-specific features for a unified annotation. We discuss the criteria followed to select the sentences included in the treebank and address the most significant linguistic considerations when adapting the UD framework conform to the grammar of the SAL. Our efforts contribute to the advancement of linguistic analyses and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the SAL. The treebank will be made available online under an open license so that to provide the possibility for further developments of NLP tools based on the Artificial Intelligence (AI) models for the Albanian language.

## introduction the albanian language is part of the indo-european family and is spoken in albania, kosovo, north macedonia, montenegro, and other diaspora communities. the language has several unique characteristics that distinguish it from other european languages. there are regional variations and dialects in the language, with the two main dialects being gheg, which is spoken in northern albania, and tosk, which is spoken in southern albania, as well as in diaspora communities in greece and italy. these two dialects have distinct lexical differences. the standard albanian language (sal) is based on the tosk dialect @xcite . universal dependencies (ud) @xcite is a framework focused on the provision of research at a multilingual level for morphological and syntactic annotation. the currently available treebank for albanian language in the ud framework consists of only 60 sentences, annotated with lemmas, morphological, and syntactic features @xcite . this paper presents the standard albanian language treebank (salt) annotated conform ud framework by expert linguistics with the support of information technology professionals, consisting of 24,537 tokens (1,400 sentences). the annotation includes sentence segmentation, word segmentation, universal part-of-speech (upos) tags, morphological and syntactic features, and lemmas, offering a new valuable resource for the study of the sal. contributions: we discuss the methodology to select the sentences of our treebank and the inclusive criteria. furthermore, after extensive work to identify special linguistic features in sal, we present the decisions made by the expert linguistics group for aspects such as verb form, noun declension, adjective agreement, and different syntactic problems, essential to create a proper standard for the annotation. the summary of our contributions is: the rest of this paper is organized as follows: in section 2, we review significant background and related research works. in section 3, we discuss the treebank development, sentence collection, and the annotation process. section 4 covers the treebank annotation schema and related discussions. finally, in section 5, we conclude our work and discuss directions for future research. ## background and related work research efforts for low-resource languages like albanian have been historically constrained. although there have been several attempts to develop annotated corpora in the albanian language, they have either remained closed-source or proved to be too limited in size and lacking interconnection between them. the largest existing corpora for the albanian language are the "albanian language corpus" (16.6 million tokens) created by the saint-petersburg institution @xcite and the sq-globe corpus (1 million words) by the beijing foreign studies university @xcite annotated with pos tags and lemmas. these two corpora are the largest ones for the albanian language, but due to them being closed-source, they are not suitable for further research works. meanwhile, @xcite have created a closed-source corpus with one million words, which is lemmatized and includes grammatical properties. @xcite present a corpus containing 118,000 tokens, annotated at the morphological level based on the ud schema, the unimorph project @xcite present a treebank with 33,483-word forms and 589 lemmas and @xcite present the first official ud treebank for the albanian language but containing only 60 sentences. other related works include @xcite , @xcite , @xcite , @xcite and @xcite that have contributed in different tagsets and small treebank for standard and gheg albanian. ## standard albanian language treebank this section outlines the development of the salt treebank. two expert linguistic conducted manual annotation due to the lack of preprocessing tools and resources for sal. tables 1 and 2 show statistics about the salt treebank. ## annotation schema in this section, we discuss the key considerations of the annotation schema used to annotate text data within the ud framework. the grammar of the albanian language has a complex inflection schema and a rich morphological and syntactic structure, which presents several challenges in annotation due to the presence of unique features specific to the language. ## conclusion and future work this paper presents the standard albanian language treebank (salt), the first universal dependencies (ud) treebank for the standard albanian language (sal), annotated by expert linguists. salt includes annotations for syntactic dependencies, part-of-speech tags, morphological features, and lemmas. adapting the rich and complex grammar of the albanian language to the ud schema involves significant challenges, such as the absence of direct mappings and the ambiguity in assigning appropriate tags. we present an overview of the language's grammatical structure, providing a detailed analysis of its key linguistic features. additionally, we discuss methods for annotating texts in sal according to the ud framework. overcoming annotation challenges requires delicately balancing and harmonizing the richness of the language's grammar with adaptation to the ud tagset, while addressing the unique language-specific features for unified annotation. expert linguists initially mapped the ud tagset to align with the language's grammar and subsequently performed manual annotations on the treebank. as future work, we aim to use our proposed treebank, composed of 1,400 sentences, as a training and testing dataset for an albanian language parser. this automated tool will facilitate the annotation of a larger treebank, aiding linguistics, computer scientists and related fields to conduct further research work on the albanian language. our treebank will be available online with open access for research purposes, aiming to foster advancements in nlp research for sal.