UD for Naija 
This UD treebank is built from the transcription of audio recordings made in 2017 for the ANR project NaijaSyncor. This oral corpus is characterised by occasional codeswitching to English as well as several native Nigerian languages including Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo. Sections codeswitched to English have been annotated following the UD English conventions. The following contains a number of elements concerning the Naija sections.
Tokenization and Word Segmentation
- Words are delimited by whitespaces or punctuation marks.
- Multiword tokens are not used in Naija.
Morphology
Tags
- Naija uses all 16 of the universal tags (with the exception of SYM, which is not relevant for oral data).
- The most frequent words tagged as PART include the negative marker no, the emphasis marker o, and the focalizer sef.
- Auxiliaries (AUX) are particles that precede the invariable lexical form of the verb.
- The copulas na, be and dey
- The past auxiliary bin.
- The aspectual auxiliaries con (Consecutive), dey (Imperfective), don (Perfective), go (Prospective), never (Negative Perfective),
- The modal auxiliaries, fit (Ability), for (Conditional), gats (Obligative), make (Subjunctive)
- The tag DET is used for determiners such as articles, deictics, etc.
- The tag PRON is used for pronouns occurring as head of noun phrases and for possessive modifiers.
Features
- Nouns have no Gender and sometimes inflect for plural Number.
- Pronouns inflect for Number, Gender, and Case.
- Verbs are invariable in Naija. TAM is marked on Auxiliaries.
- Adjectives function as modifiers of nouns and as stative Verbs. They do not agree with Nouns and only inflect for Degree.
Syntax
The annotation is carried out in SUD (Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies) with an automatic translation into UD. SUD uses the same tagset and features as UD but has a different distribution-based dependency structure. For more information, see SUD guidelines and Naija SUD page.
In UD data:
- We distinguish arguments and modifiers in the
oblrelation:obl:arg,obl:mod - We use
compound:redupfor reduplications andcompound:svcfor serial verb constructions. - We distinguish 6 types of parataxis:
parataxis:conj,parataxis:discourse,parataxis:dislocated,parataxis:insert,parataxis:obj,parataxis:parenth.