Universal Dependencies for Amharic

In this paper, we describe the process of creating an Amharic Dependency Treebank, which is the first attempt to introduce Universal Dependencies (UD) into Amharic. Amharic is a morphologically-rich and less-resourced language within the Semitic language family. In Amharic, an orthographic word may be bundled with information other than morphology. There are some clitics attached to major lexical categories with grammatical functions. We first explain the segmentation of clitics, which is problematic to retrieve from the orthographic word due to morpheme co-occurrence restriction, assimilation and ambiguity of the clitics. Then, we describe the annotation processes for POS tagging, morphological information and dependency relations. Based on this, we have created a Treebank of 1,096 sentences.