Developing Universal Dependencies for Wolof

Abstract

This paper presents work on the creation of a Universal Dependency (UD) treebank for Wolof as the first UD treebank within the Northern Atlantic branch of the Niger-Congo languages. The paper reports on various issues related to word segmentation for tokenization and the mapping of PoS tags, morphological features and dependency relations to existing conventions for annotating Wolof. It also outlines some specific constructions as a starting point for discussing several more general UD annotation guidelines, in particular for noun class marking, deixis encoding, and focus marking.