I Speak for the Árboles: Developing a Dependency Treebank for Spanish L2 and Heritage Speakers

Emiliana Pulido, Robert Pugh, Zoey Liu

Keywords: spanish learner morphosyntax, dependency annotations, parsing evaluation

TL;DR: We present the first UD-style syntactic annotations for Spanish learner data using the COWSL2H corpus, adapting the framework to account for learner-specific features and evaluating parser performance.

Abstract:

We introduce the first dependency treebank containing Universal Dependencies (UD) annotations for Spanish learner writing from the UC Davis COWSL2H corpus. Our annotations include lemmatization, POS tagging, and syntactic dependencies. We adapt the existing UD framework for Spanish L1 to account for
learner-specific features such as code-switching and non-canonical syntax. A suite of parsing evaluation experiments shows that parsers trained on learner data together with moderate sizes of Spanish L1 data can yield reasonable performance. Our annotations are openly accessible to motivate future development of learner-oriented language technologies.

Archival Status: Archival

Paper Length: Short Paper (up to 4 pages of content)

Submission Number: 194