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UD for Hausa

The Hausa language is represented by two treebanks: Northern Autogramm, for the Ader dialect of Niger Republic (Northern Hausa), and Southern Autogramm, for the Zaria dialect of Nigeria (Southern Hausa). Both are different from the Kano variety, generally accepted as Standard Hausa. The Ader (Northern) Hausa, together with the Sokoto variety, is a more archaic version of Standard Hausa, where some phonological rules have not applied. The Zaria (Southern) Hausa, on the other hand, is a “modern” version of the language where the 3-way opposition (masculine / feminine / plural) has been abandoned in the noun system, and only the plurality feature is maintained, while the feminine gender is kept in the pronominal and TAM system.

In Hausa, the TAM system is marked by pre-verbal Auxiliaries that combine Tense, Aspect, Mood, and subject agreement in Person, Number and Gender. These Auxiliaries can vary noticeably from one dialect to another. For example, the backgrounded progressive aspect in marked by /kà/ in Ader and /kèː/ in Zaria, while the same /kà/ marks the backgrounded perfect in Zaria.

Due to the difficulty of selecting a single lemma to account for these dialectal variation, we have chosen to postpone the lemmatisation of auxiliaries until a solution is found to organise related treebanks of a same language.

Tokenization and Word Segmentation

• The Southern Hausa treebank is an extension of an oral corpus (https://cortypo.huma-num.fr/index.html) interlinearized and glossed on a morphological basis.
• Tokenization had to take into account the fact that syntactic information in Zaar can be spread in different ways in words, affixes and clitics. It has been decided to keep as tokens only words (with and without affixes) and clitics while the syntactic information contained in affixes is annotated by morphological features of the affixed words. Clitics are PRON conveying syntactic functions such as complement and modifier. They are preceded by an “=” sign in the transcription. The same conventions have been used for the Northern Hausa treebank, which transcribes audio recordings done in the late 80’s.
• As we are dealing with oral data, we have chosen the illocutionary unit as the basic transcription unit. Punctuation tokens (e.g. <, >, //, etc.) organise the illocutionary unit into: pre-nucleus < nucleus > post-nucleus //

Morphology

This is an overview only. For more detailed discussion and examples, see the list of Hausa POS tags and Hausa features.

Tags

• The language specific tagset is the original annotation made from the extended version of the Leipzig Glossing Rules. (Available here).
• The UD tagset is based on a conversion from the previous annotation to UPOS.
• Zaar uses 16 of the universal tags (with the exception of SYM, which is not relevant for oral data)
  • As in other African languages (e.g. Wolof, Zaar), the verbal inflections in Hausa are gathered in a single AUX that precedes the VERB, and expresses various combinations of Tense (2 values: Future and Predictive), Aspect (4 values : Progressive, Perfect, Aorist and Iterative) and Polarity (Negative).

Features

• 2 language specific values associated with the Zaar AUX have been added to the scheme:
  • 1 for Tense (Pred = Predictive Future),
  • 1 for Aspect feature (Aor = Aorist)

Syntax

• The dependency analysis is a conversion of the manual annotation to SUD format. For more information, see SUD guidelines.
• Hausa is a SVO language.
• Hausa is a prodrop language with a strong proportion of dislocated subjects and complements. In addition to a possible independent lexical or pronominal subject (tagged nsubj), the AUX contains agreement features for Person and Number.
• We have direct object with obj, indirect object with iobj.

Treebanks

There are 2 Hausa UD treebanks:

• Hausa-SouthernAutogramm
• Hausa-SouthernAutogramm

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