UD for South Levantine Arabic 
Tokenization and Word Segmentation
- In general, words are delimited by whitespace characters. Description of exceptions follows.
- According to typographical rules, many punctuation marks are attached to a neighboring word. We always tokenize them as separate tokens (words); that holds even for hyphenated compounds and for abbreviations.
- Enclitic pronouns (such as ـهُم (–hum)), proclitic conjunctions (such as فَـ (fa–)) and prepositions (such as و (u–)) are cut off during tokenization and marked as multi-word tokens.
- Definite articles are treated as bound morphemes and they are not cut off during tokenization.
Morphology
Tags
- South Levantine Arabic uses 16 universal POS categories; at present where subordinating SCONJ and coordinating conjunctions CCONJ are distinguished
- South Levantine Arabic auxiliaries are similar in their function to that of Arabic “weak verbs الأفعال الناقصة”. Most inflect like verbs, few don’t. The following six auxiliaries are found in the data:
- The copulas كَان (kān) and عم (‘ām).
- Modal particle راح (rāḥ) “will” (which some people may substitute with the clitic version حَ (ḥa), but is not found in the data).
- Modal auxiliaries, قِدِر (qidir) “can”, حَب (ḥab) “would (like to)”, ممكن (mumkin) “could”, and the deontic modal لَازِم (lāzim) “must”.
Words tagged as PART are function words and include:
- Negation particles مش (mish) and ما (mā).
- Accusative particle إنَّ (inna) which functions as a marker.
Features
Morphological features FEAT are not available in this release, though they may be in the future.
Syntax
Core Arguments, Oblique Arguments and Adjuncts
- Nominal subject (nsubj) is a noun phrase in the nominative case, without preposition.
- For the purpose of UD the objects are divided to core objects, labeled obj or iobj and oblique objects, labeled obl:arg.
- All prepositional objects are considered oblique.
Non-verbal Clauses
- Besides the auxiliary copulas mentioned above, a personal pronoun can also serve as a copula.
Relations Overview
- The following relation subtypes are used in South Levantine Arabic:
- nmod:poss for possessive/genitive modifiers
- obl:arg for prepositional objects
- advmod:emph for adverbs or particles that modify noun phrases and emphasize or negate them
- flat:foreign for non-first words in quoted foreign phrases
Treebanks
There is one South Levantine Arabic UD treebank: