A Cantonese treebank (in Traditional Chinese characters) of film subtitles and of legislative proceedings of Hong Kong, parallel with the Chinese-HK treebank.
The Cantonese-HK UD treebank was manually annotated by Tak-sum Wong and Herman H. M. Leung at City University of Hong Kong, by finely transcribing three films shooted by students from the School of Creative Media as well as part of the section of the Election of President of the council meeting of the Legislative Council of the HKSAR of the P. R. China on 12th October, 2016 commencing at 2:13 p.m. The data are in Traditional Chinese. These trees form a parallel treebank with those in Chinese-HK.
ORIGIN
DATA
Since the Chinese-HK counterpart contains less than a myraid tokens, to make it comparable with the Mandarin counterpart, only the test set is provided.
BASIC STATISTICS
FORM and LEMMA
Since Cantonese is not an official written language, there is no standard written form. In this treebank, the FORM field adopts the popular written form while we have tried our best to find different characters attested in dictioanries or other studies for the LEMMA field to discern the homophones, in order to faciliate computer processing.
POS TAGGING
When determining the POS, one usually considers both the "morphological evidence", i.e., the linguistic form of the word, as well as the "distributional evidence", i.e., its syntactic use in the sentence. Usually, these two kinds of evidence should agree; in some cases, however, the POS of some word is tentatively alterned to fullfil the special purpose of the author.
Take an example in English, consider the word "pen" in the sentence "I pen a letter". Morphological evidence suggests the word "pen" should be tagged as an noun (NN), reflecting its normal usage. Distributional evidence suggests it should be tagged as a verb, since this word is in a typical syntactic position of verb in a SVO language.
When these two kinds of evidence contradict one another, the morphological evidence prevails.
This work was partially supported by a grant from the PROCORE-France/Hong Kong Joint Research Scheme sponsored by the Research Grants Council and the Consulate General of France in Hong Kong (Reference No.: F-CityU107/15 and N 35322RG); and by two Strategic Research Grants (Project No. 7004494 and No. 7004736) from City University of Hong Kong.
When using this treebank, please cite at least one paper from the following references: Tak-sum WONG, Kim GERDES, Herman LEUNG, and John LEE. "Quantitative Comparative Syntax on the Cantonese-Mandarin Parallel Dependency Treebank" Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics, pp. 266−275, Pisa, Italy, September 2017.
=== Machine-readable metadata ================================================= Documentation status: partial Data source: manual Data available since: UD v2.1 License: CC BY-SA 4.0 Includes text: yes Genre: spoken Lemmas: automatic UPOS: manual native XPOS: not available Features: manual native Relations: manual native Contributors: Gerdes, Kim; Lee, John; Leung, Herman; Wong, Tak-sum Contributing: elsewhere Contact: tswong-c@my.cityu.edu.hk; jsylee@cityu.edu.hk ===============================================================================