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UD Sicilian STB

Language: Sicilian (code: scn)
Family: IE

This treebank has been part of Universal Dependencies since the UD v2.17 release.

The following people have contributed to making this treebank part of UD: Cristina Bosco, Sabrina D’Alì, Elisa Di Nuovo, Mario Guglielmetti, Caterina Maria Cappello.

Repository: UD_Sicilian-STB
Search this treebank on-line: PML-TQ
Download all treebanks: UD 2.17

License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Genre: fiction

Questions, comments? General annotation questions (either Sicilian-specific or cross-linguistic) can be raised in the main UD issue tracker. You can report bugs in this treebank in the treebank-specific issue tracker on Github. If you want to collaborate, please contact [cristina • bosco (æt) unito • it]. Development of the treebank happens directly in the UD repository, so you may submit bug fixes as pull requests against the dev branch.

Annotation Source
Lemmas annotated manually
UPOS annotated manually, natively in UD style
XPOS not available
Features annotated manually, natively in UD style
Relations annotated manually, natively in UD style

Description

The Sicilian Treebank is a small parallel corpus of Sicilian texts, automatically parsed and then manually revised, with Italian translations. It includes both contemporary and folkloric materials. The main focus is documenting typical morphosyntactic features of the written Sicilian.

Sicilian-STB is the first treebank for the Sicilian language in the Universal Dependencies framework. It is a parallel resource aligned 1:1 at the sentence level between Sicilian and Italian. The texts included in this first release come from the Panzaredda website, as well as a third text consisting of 18 diatopic variants of the Sicilian legend of Colapisci. In the CoNLL-U files, each text includes a comment line at the beginning indicating the diatopic variant and, when available, the year of publication.

For the Italian translations, we used three LLMs accessed via GPT@JRC, a tool that provides safe, AI Act-compliant access to generative AI systems. Each model generated translations using three different prompting strategies. The preferred translation version was chosen based on subjective qualitative evaluations. This version was then manually corrected by native Sicilian speakers with linguistic training. The revised translations are included in the CoNLL-U files as comment lines aligned with each Sicilian sentence.

As no previous UD-formatted treebank exists for Sicilian, we generated an initial automatic annotation using pre-trained UD models for Italian. In particular, we tested parser trained on the ISDT and POSTWITA treebanks, the two largest Italian resources in the UD repository. Gold-standard sentence segmentation was applied before parsing. The automatic annotation was manually revised using the Arborator tool. Each of the three texts was annotated by one annotator and reviewed by a second. Problematic phenomena were discussed collaboratively among the three main annotators, with additional consultation involving the rest of the authors when necessary.

For the first release of the treebank, only the Sicilian side is annotated in UD format and fully revised. The Italian side remains automatically annotated without manual correction.

Acknowledgments

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References

Statistics of UD Sicilian STB

POS Tags

ADJ – ADP – ADV – AUX – CCONJ – DET – INTJ – NOUN – NUM – PART – PRON – PROPN – PUNCT – SCONJ – VERB

Features

Clitic – Definite – Degree – ExtPos – Gender – Mood – Number – NumType – Person – Polarity – Poss – PronType – Reflex – Tense – VerbForm

Relations

acl – acl:relcl – advcl – advmod – amod – appos – aux – aux:pass – case – cc – ccomp – ccomp:reported – compound – conj – cop – csubj – det – det:poss – det:predet – discourse – dislocated – expl – expl:impers – expl:pass – expl:pv – fixed – flat:name – iobj – mark – nmod – nsubj – nsubj:outer – nsubj:pass – nummod – obj – obl – obl:agent – parataxis – punct – root – vocative – xcomp

Tokenization and Word Segmentation

Morphology

Tags

Nominal Features

Degree and Polarity

Verbal Features

Pronouns, Determiners, Quantifiers

Other Features

Syntax

Auxiliary Verbs and Copula

Core Arguments, Oblique Arguments and Adjuncts

Here we consider only relations between verbs (parent) and nouns or pronouns (child).

Reflexive Verbs

Reflexive Passive

Relations Overview