Universal Dependency Treebanks for Low-Resource Indian Languages: The Case of Bhojpuri

This paper presents the first dependency treebank for Bhojpuri, a resource-poor language that belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family. The objective behind the Bhojpuri Treebank (BHTB) project is to create a substantial, syntactically annotated treebank which not only acts as a valuable resource in building language technological tools, also helps incross-lingual learning and typological research. Currently, the treebank consists of 4,881 annotated tokens in accordance with the annotation scheme of Universal Dependencies (UD). A Bhojpuri tagger and parser were created using machine learning approach. The accuracy of the model is 57.49% UAS, 45.50% LAS, 79.69% UPOS accuracy, and 77.64% XPOSaccuracy. The paper describes the details of the project including a discussion on linguistic analysis and annotation process of the Bhojpuri UD treebank.