LuxBank: The First Universal Dependency Treebank for Luxembourgish
This work provides the first syntactic resource for Luxembourgish, benefiting linguists, language learners, and NLP applications like spell checkers and language models, while offering a model for documenting other semi-standardized languages.
The authors introduced LuxBank, the first Universal Dependencies Treebank for Luxembourgish, addressing the lack of syntactic annotation for this low-resource language spoken by approximately 400,000 people, and established formal guidelines enabling large-scale quantitative analysis of its syntax.
The Universal Dependencies (UD) project has significantly expanded linguistic coverage across 161 languages, yet Luxembourgish, a West Germanic language spoken by approximately 400,000 people, has remained absent until now. In this paper, we introduce LuxBank, the first UD Treebank for Luxembourgish, addressing the gap in syntactic annotation and analysis for this `low-research' language. We establish formal guidelines for Luxembourgish language annotation, providing the foundation for the first large-scale quantitative analysis of its syntax. LuxBank serves not only as a resource for linguists and language learners but also as a tool for developing spell checkers and grammar checkers, organising existing text archives and even training large language models. By incorporating Luxembourgish into the UD framework, we aim to enhance the understanding of syntactic variation within West Germanic languages and offer a model for documenting smaller, semi-standardised languages. This work positions Luxembourgish as a valuable resource in the broader linguistic and NLP communities, contributing to the study of languages with limited research and resources.