Parallel U niversal D ependencies Treebanks for T urkic Languages (2025)

Abstract: We introduce the first fully aligned and manually annotated parallel Universal Dependencies (UD) treebanks for four Turkic languages: Azerbaijani, Kyrgyz, Turkish, and Uzbek. These resources currently consist of 148 strategically selected sentences that illustrate typologically significant morphosyntactic phenomena across these related yet distinct languages. These parallel treebanks enable systematic comparative studies of Turkic syntax and may be instrumental in cross-lingual NLP applications. All treebanks are available as part of UD v2.16.

## introduction the universal dependencies (ud) framework has emerged as the leading standard for crosslinguistically consistent grammatical annotation, covering over 150 languages across more than 300 treebanks @xcite . however, the coverage and depth of resources for turkic languages are limited and vary considerably in treebank size and availability across the language family. more critically, the absence of parallel treebanks for these languages limits systematic cross-linguistic comparisons, despite their shared typological characteristics and historical ties. to the best of our knowledge, there are only two parallel treebanking efforts that include a turkic language (turkish in both): (1) the pud treebank, created for the conll 2017 shared task on multilingual parsing @xcite , (2) the atis treebank @xcite . the pud treebank consists of 1000 manually translated sentences in 22 languages, including turkish. the atis treebank contains a translation of the english atis (airline travel information system) corpus to turkish. as of ud version 2.16, there are 24 treebanks for 11 turkic languages (including historical and codeswitching varieties, see this paper addresses this gap by introducing the first fully aligned parallel ud treebanks for four turkic languages: azerbaijani, kyrgyz, turkish, and uzbek. these languages represent distinct branches of the turkic family-oghuz (azerbaijani, turkish), kipchak (kyrgyz), and karluk (uzbek)-allowing for meaningful crossbranch comparisons. even though most treebanks introduced in this work were annotated by a single annotator (one of the authors), the treebanks are cross-checked by others to ensure the consistency of annotations as well as their quality. our approach combines carefully constructed grammatical examples with linguistic expertise to create resources that highlight both the shared typological features and unique syntactic traits of each language. the treebanks are available as part of universal dependencies v2.16 and support applications in cross-lingual parsing, comparative research, and language education. ## treebank construction this section outlines our treebank development process, including the general annotation methodology and language-specific approaches for each treebank. we also provide a quantitative analysis of the parallel corpora to highlight typological similarities and distinctive features of these languages. additionally, we discuss some annotation issues and describe our approach to resolving them. ## conclusion and future work we presented the first fully aligned parallel universal dependencies treebanks for four turkic languages. this work fills a significant gap in resources for comparative studies of turkic syntax and provides valuable data for cross-lingual nlp applications. our future work includes extending these treebanks with additional texts from various genres and adding more turkic languages, particularly from less-represented branches of the family. we also plan to conduct more detailed analyses of the morphosyntactic phenomena highlighted in this initial study. we invite the research community to collaborate on this ongoing project to improve the representation of turkic languages in language resources and models.