The UD-NewsCrawl Treebank: Reflections and Challenges from a Large-scale Tagalog Syntactic Annotation Project

2025/05/26 by Angelina Aquino, Lester James V. Miranda, Aquino, Angelina A. +3
Arts and Humanities · Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling #Translation Studies and Practices

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.20428

openalex publication_date 2025/05/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

This paper presents UD-NewsCrawl, the largest Tagalog treebank to date, containing 15.6k trees manually annotated according to the Universal Dependencies framework. We detail our treebank development process, including data collection, pre-processing, manual annotation, and quality assurance procedures. We provide baseline evaluations using multiple transformer-based models to assess the performance of state-of-the-art dependency parsers on Tagalog. We also highlight challenges in the syntactic analysis of Tagalog given its distinctive grammatical properties, and discuss its implications for the annotation of this treebank. We anticipate that UD-NewsCrawl and our baseline model implementations will serve as valuable resources for advancing computational linguistics research in underrepresented languages like Tagalog.

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