UD for Swedish Sign Language
Tokenization and Word Segmentation
- The Swedish Sign Language Corpus (SSLC) treebank depends on the sign glosses provided in the SSLC source material, so the source text is already tokenized.
- Sign glosses are always delimited by whitespace.
- There is no punctuation.
- Multiword tokens are not used.
Morphology
Tags
- Swedish Sign Language uses 12 of the universal tags.
- The following tags are not used:
- SYM and PUNCT are not used because this is not a written-language corpus.
- PART is not used because we do not see signs that are special enough to warrant this.
- PROPN is not used because there is no syntactic/morphological distinction with other nouns, and the corresponding semantic information is present in the glosses (proper nouns contain the
@en
substring). - SCONJ is not used because subordination is often only marked with non-manual markers that are not present in the transcription, or in a few cases with adverbs.
- The auxiliary tag (AUX) is used for the following cases, with remaining verb-like signs being tagged as VERB:
- The copula VARA (be) and the copula-like verbs HETA (be named) and SE-UT (look like).
- The signs PERF and PERF-NEG that mark perfect tense.
- Modal verbs such as SKA, VILL, KAN that are used with a main verb.
- The tag DET is used for:
- The sign EN (one) when modifying a noun as an article.
- Pointing signs used with a noun.
- The tag PRON is used for:
- Pronoun signs such as PRO1, NÅGON (somebody), etc.
- Pointing signs when used as heads of noun phrases.
Features
- No UD morphological features are used for Swedish Sign Language.
- Note that linearizing and transcribing or glossing a signed language is not trivial, and results in some degree of information loss. If data in Swedish Sign Language, or some other sign language, using a different convention than the Swedish Sign Language Corpus (glossing of manual signs) is to be included in UD, this may be different.
- Negated verbs have glosses that end with
-INTE
(lexically negative; suppletive) or*INTE
(cliticized manual negation marking). - Lemmas are not used.
Syntax
- Subjects may occur on either side of the verb, and often subjects are repeated and may occur on both sides of the verb. In this case, the conj relation holds between the second and the first sign, and the first sign has an nsubj relation to the verb.
- Objects generally follow the verb, without preposition.
- Copula constructions in nonverbal clauses are used for …
- The following subtypes are used in Swedish Sign Language:
- acl:relcl for relative clauses
- compound:prt for verb particles
- compound:svc for serial verb constructions
- nmod:poss for possessive/genitive modifiers
Treebanks
There is one Swedish Sign Language UD treebank: