Towards an open-source universal-dependency treebank for Erzya

This article describes the first steps towards a open-source dependency treebank for Erzya based on universal dependency (UD) annotation standards. The treebank contains 610 sentences with 6661 tokens and is based on texts from a range of open-source and public domain original Erzya sources. This ensures its free availability and extensibility. Texts in the treebank are first morphologically analyzed and disambiguated after which they are annotated manually for dependency structure. In the article we present some issues in dependency syntax for Erzya and how they are analyzed in the universal-dependency framework. Preliminary statistics are given for dependency parsing of Erzya, along with points of interest for future research.