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UD Nheengatu CompLin

Language: Nheengatu (code: yrl)
Family: Tupian

This treebank has been part of Universal Dependencies since the UD v2.11 release.

The following people have contributed to making this treebank part of UD: Leonel Figueiredo de Alencar, Dominick Maia Alexandre.

Repository: UD_Nheengatu-CompLin
Search this treebank on-line: PML-TQ
Download all treebanks: UD 2.18

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Genre: spoken, bible, fiction, nonfiction, grammar-examples

Questions, comments? General annotation questions (either Nheengatu-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 [leonel • de • alencar (æt) ufc • br]. Development of the treebank happens outside the UD repository. If there are bugs, either the original data source or the conversion procedure must be fixed. Do not submit pull requests against the UD repository.

Annotation Source
Lemmas annotated manually
UPOS annotated manually, natively in UD style
XPOS annotated manually
Features annotated manually, natively in UD style
Relations annotated manually, natively in UD style

Description

UD_Nheengatu-CompLin is a treebank of Nheengatu, also known as Modern Tupi and Língua Geral Amazônica (ISO 639: yrl). It comprises sentences drawn from a wide range of published sources, including spontaneous speech, grammatical descriptions, fables, myths, coursebooks, and dictionaries.

This is the first morphosyntactic treebank of Nheengatu. It remains a work in progress, with ongoing expansion planned for the coming months.

The treebank comprises sentences from a wide range of published sources freely available online, including grammatical descriptions, fables, myths, coursebooks, and dictionaries. The sentences were extracted either from PDF text files, transcribed from non-searchable (image-only) PDFs, or manually converted from phonetic transcriptions into orthography. Throughout the treebank, we generally adopt the spelling system proposed by Avila (2021), diverging from it only in a few cases.

The annotation was performed semi-automatically: we first applied the Yauti morphosyntactic analyzer (de Alencar 2023, 2025) to each sentence and then manually revised the output.

The development of this treebank and related tools is part of the research activities of the Research Group on Computation and Natural Language (Computação e Linguagem Natural — CompLin) at the Humanities Center of the Federal University of Ceará, Brazil. The main contributor to this effort is Leonel Figueiredo de Alencar, coordinator of the CompLin group. Additional annotators include Dominick Maia Alexandre, Hélio Leonam Barroso Silva, and Juliana Lopes Gurgel, who was a scholarship holder in the DACILAT project funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo — FAPESP), Process No. 22/09158-5.

The following repository contains the most up-to-date development version of the treebank, as well as related tools and resources:

https://github.com/CompLin/nheengatu

The treebank currently includes examples from Seixas (1853), Hartt (1872), Magalhães (1876), Sympson (1877), Rodrigues (1890), Aguiar (1898), Costa (1909), Studart (1926), Amorim (1928), Hartt (1938), Moore, Facundes, and Pires (1994), Casasnovas (2006), Cruz (2011), Comunidade de Terra Preta (2013), Stradelli (1929/2014), Navarro (2016), Melgueiro, Câmara, and Martins (2019), Muller et al. (2019), de Alencar (2021), Avila (2021), and Melgueiro (2022), as well as from the Novo Testamento na língua Nyengatu (1973/2019) and issues 3 and 17 of the Leetra Indígena journal (Universidade Federal de São Carlos, 2014, 2015).

Acknowledgments

We thank Eduardo de Almeida Navarro (University of São Paulo) for kindly allowing us to use examples and texts from his coursebook (Navarro 2016), whose glossary served as the initial basis for the morphological analyzer used to annotate the UD_Nheengatu-CompLin treebank.

We are greatly indebted to Avila (2021)’s dictionary, from which numerous treebank sentences are drawn. This resource also provided invaluable lexical, grammatical, and semantic information for the further development of the morphological analyzer and related annotation tools. We are especially grateful to its author, Marcel Twardowsky Avila, for making the XML version of the dictionary available to us and for clarifying many questions regarding its entries.

We gratefully acknowledge the scholarships awarded to annotators by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP), through the DACILAT project (Process No. 22/09158-5), and by the Foundation for the Support and Development of Research in the State of Ceará (FUNCAP).

We are indebted to Gabriela Lourenço Fernandes and Susan Gabriela Huallpa Huanacuni, interns at the Biblioteca Brasiliana Guita e José Mindlin of the University of São Paulo (USP), as well as to its research specialist and curator, João Marcos Cardoso, for their transcriptions of stories from Amorim (1928) and Rodrigues (1890).

We also thank the Federal University of Amazonas Press (Editora da Universidade Federal do Amazonas — UFAM), particularly its director, Sérgio Freire, for granting permission to incorporate texts from Casasnovas (2006) into the treebank.

License

The copyright of the treebank sentences and their translations remains with their respective authors. This data is made available solely to support research, teaching, and the learning of the Nheengatu language. It should not be used for commercial purposes. For more information, see LICENSE.txt.

References

Statistics of UD Nheengatu CompLin

POS Tags

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

Features

AdpType – AdvType – Aspect – Case – Clitic – Compound – Definite – Degree – Deixis – Derivation – Evident – ExtPos – Foc – Modality – Mood – Number – Number[grnd] – Number[psor] – NumType – PartType – Person – Person[grnd] – Person[psor] – Polarity – Poss – PronType – PunctType – Red – Rel – Style – Tense – Typo – VerbForm – Voice

Relations

acl – acl:relcl – advcl – advcl:relcl – advmod – amod – appos – aux – case – cc – ccomp – compound – conj – cop – csubj – dep – det – discourse – dislocated – expl – fixed – flat – goeswith – iobj – mark – nmod – nmod:poss – nsubj – nummod – obj – obl – orphan – parataxis – punct – reparandum – 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).

Relations Overview