The Low Saxon LSDC Dataset at Universal Dependencies

Abstract

We present an extension of the Low Saxon Universal Dependencies dataset and discuss a few annotation-related challenges. Low Saxon is a West-Germanic low-resource language that lacks a common standard and therefore poses challenges for NLP. The 1,000 sentences in our dataset cover the last 200 years and 8 of the 9 major dialects. They are presented both in original and in normalised spelling and two lemmata are provided: A Modern Low Saxon lemma and a Middle Low Saxon lemma. Several annotation-related issues result from dialectal variation in morphological categories, and we explain differences in the pronoun, gender, case, and mood system. Furthermore, we take up three syntactic constructions that do not occur in Standard Dutch or Standard German: the possessive dative, pro-drop in pronominal adverbs, and complementiser doubling in subordinate interrogative clauses. These constructions are also rare in the other Germanic UD datasets and have not always been annotated consistently.