# **SUD_Cantonese-HK**: SUD treebank conversion for the corpus UD_Cantonese-HK version 2.18
This treebank was automatically generated from the UD treebank:
[UD_Cantonese-HK](https://github.com/UniversalDependencies/UD_Cantonese-HK/releases/tag/r2.18).

See [SUD data page](https://surfacesyntacticud.org/data/) for more details about the conversion process.

The rest of this file is a copy of the original README associated to **UD_Cantonese-HK** and therefore refers to UD.

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# Summary

A Cantonese treebank (in Traditional Chinese characters) of film subtitles and of legislative proceedings
of Hong Kong, parallel with the Chinese-HK treebank.

# Introduction

The Cantonese-HK UD treebank was manually annotated by Tak-sum Wong and Herman H. M. Leung at City University of Hong Kong, by finely transcribing three films shooted by students from the School of Creative Media as well as part of the section of the Election of President of the council meeting of the Legislative Council of the HKSAR of the P. R. China on 12th October, 2016 commencing at 2:13 p.m. The data are in Traditional Chinese.  These trees form a parallel treebank with those in Chinese-HK.

ORIGIN

#send_id = 1 to 410
* Title: Missing days / 小時光
* Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qSMiw0vhzU
* Duration: 30 minutes
* Fluency: The dialogues are mostly prepared.

#send_id = 411 to 547
* Title: Tempo in Temple / 廟眾樂樂
* Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e8Lqd6grTE
* Duration: 16 minutes
* Fluency: This is an interview.  Most sentences are not prepared and thus contain a lot of disfluencies.  A lot of reparandums are tagged.

#send_id = 548 to 650
* Title: What day is today / 今日星期幾
* Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBGwxIDiZ_o
* Duration: 31 minutes
* Fluency: The dialogues are mostly prepared.  This film contains a lot of dead air.

#send_id = 651 to 1004
* Title: Election of President: The council meeting of the Legislative Council of HKSAR on 12th October, 2016(14:13:49 ~ 14:47:54)
* Source: https://www.legco.gov.hk/yr16-17/chinese/counmtg/hansard/cm20161012-translate-c.pdf#nameddest=eop	https://webcast.legco.gov.hk/public/zh-hk/SearchResult?MeetingID=M16100003
* Duration: 34 minutes 5 seconds
* Fluency: This is an discission.  Most sentences are not prepared and thus contain a lot of disfluencies.  A lot of reparandums are tagged.

DATA

Since the Chinese-HK counterpart contains less than a myraid tokens, to make it comparable with the Mandarin counterpart, only the test set is provided.

BASIC STATISTICS

* Tree count:  1004
* Word count:  13918
* Token count: 13918
* Dep. relations: 48 of which 17 language specific
* POS tags: 15
* Category=value feature pairs: 1

FORM and LEMMA

Since Cantonese is not an official written language, there is no standard written form.  In this treebank, the FORM field adopts the popular written form while we have tried our best to find different characters attested in dictioanries or other studies for the LEMMA field to discern the homophones, in order to faciliate computer processing.

POS TAGGING

When determining the POS, one usually considers both the "morphological evidence", i.e., the linguistic form of the word, as well as the "distributional evidence", i.e., its syntactic use in the sentence. Usually, these two kinds of evidence should agree; in some cases, however, the POS of some word is tentatively alterned to fullfil the special purpose of the author.

Take an example in English, consider the word "pen" in the sentence "I pen a letter".  Morphological evidence suggests the word "pen" should be tagged as an noun (NN), reflecting its normal usage. Distributional evidence suggests it should be tagged as a verb, since this word is in a typical syntactic position of verb in a SVO language.

When these two kinds of evidence contradict one another, the morphological evidence prevails.

# Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by a grant from the PROCORE-France/Hong Kong Joint Research Scheme sponsored by the Research Grants Council and the Consulate General of France in Hong Kong (Reference No.: F-CityU107/15 and N 35322RG); and by two Strategic Research Grants (Project No. 7004494 and No. 7004736) from City University of Hong Kong.

# References

When using this treebank, please cite at least one paper from the following references:
Tak-sum WONG, Kim GERDES, Herman LEUNG, and John LEE. "Quantitative Comparative Syntax on the Cantonese-Mandarin Parallel Dependency Treebank" Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics, pp. 266−275, Pisa, Italy, September 2017.

# Changelog

* 2025-09-12 v2.16
  * add parallel corpus information to machine-readable metadata
  * add parallel data support with parallel_id metadata
* 2022-11-15 v2.11
  * Fixed validation errors.
  * Added lemmas where they were missing.
* 2019-03-11 v1.3
  * Data from the Legislative Council added
* 2018-04-15 v1.2
  * Repository renamed from UD_Cantonese to UD_Cantonese-HK.

<pre>
=== Machine-readable metadata =================================================
Documentation status: partial
Data source: manual
Data available since: UD v2.1
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Includes text: yes
Parallel: hk
Genre: spoken
Lemmas: automatic
UPOS: manual native
XPOS: not available
Features: manual native
Relations: manual native
Contributors: Gerdes, Kim; Lee, John; Leung, Herman; Wong, Tak-sum
Contributing: elsewhere
Contact: tswong-c@my.cityu.edu.hk; jsylee@cityu.edu.hk
===============================================================================
</pre>
