A corpus of K’iche’ annotated for morphosyntactic structure (2021)

Abstract: This article describes a collection of sentences in K’iche’ annotated for morphology and syntax. K’iche’ is a language in the Mayan language family, spoken in Guatemala. The annotation is done according to the guidelines of the Universal Dependencies project. The corpus consists of a total of 1,433 sentences containing approximately 10,000 tokens and is released under a free/open-source licence. We present a comparison of parsing systems for K’iche’ using this corpus and describe how it can be used for mining linguistic examples.

## introduction for some time, one of the fundamental resources for language technology has been a part-of-speech tagged (or morphologically annotated and disambiguated) corpus. creating these resources has traditionally been a lengthy process, from defining an annotation scheme to collecting texts, training annotators and performing the annotation. recently however advances in annotation schemes and endto-end linguistic processing pipelines mean that the development of a single resource, a treebank can enable a whole pipeline of language analysis tools from tokenisation to dependency parsing from a single resource. in this paper we describe the annotation of such a corpus for k'iche', a mayan language of guatemala and outline how the corpus can be used to train systems for linguistic annotation. the remainder of the paper is laid out as follows: section 2 gives a brief grammatical overview of k'iche'; section 3 gives an overview of related work on k'iche' syntax; section 4 describes the corpus and preprocessing steps; section 5 describes the annotation process; section 6 describes a range of syntactic constructions in k'iche' and how they were annotated. we evaluate parsing performance using the corpus in section 7 and show how models trained on the corpus can be used in finding lin-guistic examples. finally, we describe some future work (section 8) and present some concluding remarks (section 9). ## k'iche' k'iche' (iso-639-3: quc, also k'ichee', previously quiché) is a language within the quichean-mamean branch of the mayan language family. as of the 2018 guatemalan census, it is documented to have over 1.5 million native speakers, however the number is likely higher now and does not account for speakers in the diaspora. there are roughly 23 variants of k'iche' spoken throughout southwestern guatemala. k'iche' is a language with ergative-absolutive alignment, basic verb-initial order of constituents, and prefixes for agreement. the language is both prefixing (for inflection) and suffixing (for derivation and some inflection). neither subject nor object need be overtly expressed when recoverable from context. an important part of the k'iche' grammatical system are the sets of agreement markers. these are traditionally split into set a and set b. set a, or the ergative (erg) markers, are used on nouns to crossreference, that is, agree with, their possessors and on verbs to indicate a transitive subject. set b markers, or the absolutive (abs) markers, are used to crossreference the transitive object or intransitive subject. k'iche' verbal morpho-syntax, like other mayan languages, is organised around transitivity. root verbs, i.e., verbs of the form cvc, and their derived non-cvc counterparts are classified as either transitive or intransitive, and this classification has implications for the kinds of morphology the verb can take. it controls the distribution of set a and set b morphology that we have already seen, but it also constrains what kinds of nominalisations a verb stem allows @xcite , a well as which 'status suffixes' a verb stem takes (see section 6.9 the set a markers have phonological variants before consonants, c and vowels, v . there are also formal forms which appear as a combination of one of the prefixes with a following particle, lal or alaj. the set b first person plural morph may also be uj-. while the basic word of k'iche' is vos, all possible word orders are attested, conditioned by discourse factors, the most important of which are topic and focus. focus involves marking the focused expression with a focus particle, and then preposing it to a position before the verb. topicalisation involves morphologically unmarked preposing of the topicalised expression before the verb. if a clause contains both topicalised and focused expressions, the topic comes before the focus. ## related work broadly, this work is a corpus of k'iche' sentences, morphosyntactically analysed and annotated in a way to support downstream natural language processing tasks like machine translation, relation extraction, etc. while there are annotated corpora of k'iche', like the k'iche' segment of the oxlajuuj @xcite of telma can pixabaj's 2018 annotated collection of ceremonial discourse in k'iche', these are not in easily parsable formats that can be fed directly into existing nlp pipelines. the nearest analogs to the work presented here are sachse's 2016 xml standard for morphological annotations of mayan languages, including k'iche', and palmer's 2010 igt-xml corpus of the related language uspanteko. while parseable, and annotated with grammatical information like part-of-speech, these are not treebanks like the present work. in fact, ours is the first treebank of any mayan language. ## corpus the corpus is composed of sentences from a range of text types. around two thirds are example sentences either from a published dictionary @xcite or from linguistic research @xcite . to this we added some language learning materials @xcite , and religious, medical and legal texts @xcite @xcite . the remainder was from a collection of folk tales (ministerio de @xcite . the majority of the texts came with a translation either in spanish or in english. some texts, such as the linguistic examples additionally came with interlinear glosses. for the texts that did not have translations, we performed a rough-andready glossing into spanish with the aid of a prototype machine translation system. 1 the texts were chosen for their availability and for the range of linguistic phenomena they exhibited, as one of the aims of the work was to create annotation guidelines that can be used in further annotation and adapted to other mayan languages, this was an important consideration. ## annotation process we chose the ud scheme for the annotation as it provides pre-defined recommendations on which to base annotation guidelines. this reduces the amount of time needed to develop annotation guidelines for a given language, as where the existing universal guidelines are adequate, they can be imported wholesale into the language-specific guidelines. the treebank was annotated by the first author and difficult cases were determined by discussion between the first author and the second author. ## constructions in the following subsections we describe some particular features of k'iche' that are interesting or novel with respect to the universal dependencies annotation scheme, and our approach to annotating them. inline examples are given on three lines, with the original text, a segmentation showing the inflectional morphs, and an approximate translation in english. glosses are provided when necessary for explaining some particular feature or construction. 3 where contractions are split, the split is indicated with a hyphen on the both sides of the split, so for example ch-followed by -we should be read chwe. the focus is primarily on the relation between syntactic words, so for example constructions such as the morphological expression and annotation of agreement, tense-aspect-mood prefixes, incorporated movement, and possessive prefixes are not outlined here. it suffices to say that these are encoded with @xmath0. ## experiments here we present two experiments using the corpus. the first is an evaluation of three different parsing pipelines and the second is an experiment in using automatic parsing for mining linguistic examples. ## future work we would like to investigate the use of enhanced dependencies foot_5 to provide a more semantics-oriented encoding of relational nouns. for example if we take example (23), we could envisage an enhanced obl link from the verb xkunax 'was cured' to the semantic head of the agent phrase ixoqib' 'the women' (29) where we indicate the differences with respect to the basic tree in boldface. this would fall under case information in the enhanced schema and would be an additional layer on top of the basic syntax. the process could be partially automated using the grew tool. ## concluding remarks we have presented the first syntactically annotated corpus of sentences in k'iche'. both the corpus and the documentation of the annotation scheme are freely available foot_6 through the universal depen-dencies project. 10 it is our hope that the work we describe here will facilitate the annotation of, and promote language technology for other mayan languages.