Alexandra Kozhukhar at Depling 2017 on Universal Dependencies

From 18 to 20 September the international conference on dependency linguistics Depling 2017 took place in Pisa (Italy). Intern-researcher of the Linguistic Convergence Laboratory Alexandra Kozhukhar gave a presentation on "Universal Dependencies for Dargwa Mehweb", in which she talked about her experience applying Universal Dependencies to Mehweb (a Dargwa language spoken in the Daghestanian village Mehweb). Her goal was to show some peculiarities of the language that may cause problems when working with the Universal Dependencies approach, and to suggest and discuss some possible solutions for these problems.

As a result of the discussion, the organizers agreed to expand the list of locative features (Mehweb has a very rich system of locative and orientational expressions) and also accepted some other suggestions. In addition, Alexandra received access to the Universal Dependencies repository on Github, and was offered a tool for automatic annotation. These are both important for the continuation of the project.

Plans for the near future are to further automate and continue the annotation process and ultimately, to enrich the database of syntactic trees of Universal Dependencies with Mehweb data.