Developing Universal Dependencies for Wolof

The paper can be found here.

Wolof is a Niger-Congo language (however it is Senegambian where Bantu languages are Benue-Congo (citation needed)).

Computational grammar of Wolof in the LFG framework (page 1). This was used to create the first treebank of Wolof (see the ParGramBank paper Sulger et al. 2013).

The dependency treebank crated is not the result of automatic conversion of the LFG treebank, though the LFG treebank did serve as a basis for annotation. However, this is because they see significant mapping issues between LFG and UD (though they plan to do this automatic conversion at a later time).

13 noun classes (8 singular, 2 plural, 2 locative and 1 manner). Locus of noun class marking is on the nominal modifiers not the noun.

Determiners encode proximal and distal relations for both the speaker and addressee.

Noun classes in Wolof lack semantic coherence (citing McLaughlin, 1997).

Wolof nouns are typically not inflected except for the genetive and possessive case

No adjective category, stative verbs used instead (similar to Swahili though there are still a small set of Adjectives in Swahili).