UD for Pali 
Pāli is an Indo-Aryan language, widely studied as the liturgical language of Theravāda Buddhism.
Orthography
- While Pāli can traditionally be written with a variety of scripts, for UD we use the IAST Romanization standard.
- If your corpus or text is in another script or alternate Romanization, you can use a tool like aksharamukha to automatically convert it to IAST.
- As different scripts use different, and sometimes no, punctuation, we further standardize our orthography by removing all punctuation from our texts.
- IAST is case insensitive. Here, we use lowercase, with the first letter of each sentence capitalized by convention.
Sentence Segmentation
While we strip out punctuation in our # text rows, we do recommend using any punctuation in your source to help segment into sentences. In the Pāli Text Society and Mahāsaṅgīti editions, you should generally use both semicolons (;) and periods (.) to split sentences. However, be aware that Pāli verses may sometimes use semicolons to mark pāda “line” boundaries which are not semantic. Always segment sentences by syntax.
Tokenization and Word Segmentation
- Words are generally delimited by spaces.
- Compounds are split and sandhi undone as it is the custom in Sanskritic linguistics.
- Compounds receive token ranges (e.g.
10-12) and should get the appropriate compound relation subtype. - Sandhi should be marked with a
SpaceAfter=Noin the earlier token’sMISCand should not get a range id. - Multi-word tokens are generally not used. Parts of a multi-word name (e.g. “Saccaka Nigaṇṭhāputta”) should get the flat:name dependency relation.
Morphology
Lemmatization
The LEMMA for all verb forms is the 3rd-person singular present indicative of the underlying verb.
For example, the past participle gata “gone” gets the LEMMA gacchati.
Noun Lemmas
Lemmas are always lowercase, even for proper nouns.
For personal pronouns, collapse the cases down to the nominative. For example, amhākaṃ gets mayaṃ and te gets tvaṃ. Keep first and second, singular and plural separate.
For demonstrative pronouns, collapse the cases, gender, and number to the nominative, singular, neuter form:
- Use tad for all ta- forms: sā, sa, taṃ, tena, etc.
- Use yad for all ya- forms: yo, yā, yaṃ, yamhi, etc.
- Use idaṃ for its various forms: ayaṃ, imaṃ, imāni, imehi, anena, etc.
Substantives and adjectives should get the stem form as their lemma. For example, itthiyo has the lemma itthi, bhikkhave gets the lemma bhikkhu, rasso the lemma rassa, rāja the lemma rājan, bhagavato bhagavant, etc.
Part of Speech Tags
Participles are tagged as VERBs and not ADJs or ADVs.
This means that they cannot get the amod dependency relation when used to modify a noun, so we use acl instead to attach it to its target noun.
Because Pāli is originally an oral language, we are stripping out symbols and punctuation, meaning we do not use the SYM or PUNCT tags.
Determiners
If a pronoun such as imaṃ is used as a determiner (i.e. it gets deprel det pointing to a substantive) then it should get the UPOS DET instead of PRON.
Particles
The following particles get the PART UPOS:
- The quote-ending particle ti
LEMMA: itiDEPREL:markto the head of the quoted clause- The preceding token should usually get
SpaceAfter=No(as appropriate)
- The negation particle na / n’
- The lemma is na
- Mark it as
Polarity=NeginFEATS - Give it the advmod relation to the negated head.
- api / pi
- The lemma is api
- It should normally get the discourse dependency relation when used rhetorically, but can get
advmodif used conjunctively.
- eva and kho
- Normally get the
discoursedependency, except infixedphrases
- Normally get the
- kira
- When used as “apparently” it should also get the
discourserelation. - Note that “kira” is not a particle but a
VERBif it is the imperative 2nd sg or the reflexive aorist 1st sg of kirati.
- When used as “apparently” it should also get the
Instruction: Specify any unused tags. Explain what words are tagged as PART. Describe how the AUX-VERB and DET-PRON distinctions are drawn, and specify whether there are (de)verbal forms tagged as ADJ, ADV or NOUN. Include links to language-specific tag definitions if any.
Features
Some forms in Pāli are ambiguous. For example, a feminine noun of the -ā class with a -āya suffix might be Singular Instrumental, Ablative, Genitive, Dative, or Locative! When Case can be inferred from context, feel free to mark just the semantically correct case. If multiple parses are reasonable in a given context, list all the semantically plausible values in alphabetical order, separated by commas (e.g. if you have an -āya noun, and all but instrumental are reasonable parses, mark it Case=Abl,Dat,Gen,Loc|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing).
Verbs
All verb forms in Pāli should get the VERB UPOS.
Finite Verbs
Should have the VerbForm=Fin along with Mood, Tense, Person, Number, and Voice.
Absolutives
Absolutives (sometimes called “gerunds”) formed in Pāli with -tvā / -ya get the VerbForm=Conv feature and are attached to the main verb via advcl.
Infinitives
Infinitives in Pāli end in -tuṃ, have the VerbForm=Inf and are typically xcomp.
Participles
Participles have the following FEATS:
VerbForm=PartVoice=ActorVoice=Pass- Full nominal agreement features (Case, Gender, Number)
Instruction: Describe inherent and inflectional features for major word classes (at least NOUN and VERB). Describe other noteworthy features. Include links to language-specific feature definitions if any.
Syntax
Since all the participles have VERB in UPOS, they cannot be used as amod. They are either acl if they modify a noun or advcl if they modify a verb or a clause.
Instruction: Give criteria for identifying core arguments (subjects and objects), and describe the range of copula constructions in nonverbal clauses. List all subtype relations used. Include links to language-specific relations definitions if any.
Treebanks
There is one Pāli UD treebank: