Two languages, one treebank: building a Turkish–German code-switching treebank and its challenges

Abstract

This paper presents the SAGT Turkish–German code-switching treebank, and observations and annotation challenges we encountered during its development. The treebank consists of transcriptions of bilingual conversations annotated with several layers: language IDs, lemmas, POS tags, morphological features, and dependency relations. The annotations follow the Universal Dependencies annotation scheme and the conventions used in monolingual treebanks as much as possible. We present and discuss a number of issues that arise because of the need for consistent multilingual annotation within a single treebank, as well as the informal language, which is where code-switching is observed most. Besides proposing solutions to these issues, we present some observations about code-switching phenomena that are only possible to observe in a data set with rich linguistic annotation. The treebank was annotated with a focus on quality of annotations through an iterative process of detecting and correcting annotation errors. We also present quantitative measures for indication of annotation quality. The code-switching treebank created in this study is released to the public through Universal Dependencies repositories.