Extending Enhanced Universal Dependencies to Nheengatu: Semi-Automated Control and Raising Annotation

• Dominick Maia Alexandre UFC
• Leonel Figueiredo de Alencar UFC / Unicamp

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/stil.2026.26653

Resumo

This paper presents the first Enhanced Universal Dependencies annotation effort for a Brazilian Indigenous language, focusing on XCOMP constructions in Nheengatu, an endangered Tupian language. We describe a semiautomatic pipeline for the UD Nheengatu-CompLin treebank to annotate control and raising predicates and propagated subjects. The method combines theoretical discussions on XCOMP constructions with corpus-based analysis of Nheengatu syntax to create rule-based enhancement heuristics. The work also provides annotation guidelines and expands EUD resources for Indigenous and low-resource languages within the Universal Dependencies framework.

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