[2606.12708] AfriSUD: A Dependency Treebank Collection for Evaluating Models on African Languages
[Submitted on 10 Jun 2026]
Title:AfriSUD: A Dependency Treebank Collection for Evaluating Models on African Languages
View a PDF of the paper titled AfriSUD: A Dependency Treebank Collection for Evaluating Models on African Languages, by Happy Buzaaba and 17 other authors
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Abstract:Despite their linguistic diversity and global significance, African languages remain underrepresented in research and resources to support NLP. We aim to bridge this gap by introducing AfriSUD, the first large-scale collection of syntactically annotated treebanks for nine diverse African languages spanning major language families and regions across Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies (SUD) framework, our community-led effort provides high-quality, native-speaker verified data that capture typological key features such as agglutination and tone. We evaluate a range of models on AfriSUD for part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing including non-transformer baselines, multilingual pretrained encoders, and LLMs. Our results reveal a significant syntax gap, where models still show clear limitations across the nine languages, suggesting that existing architectures may not fully capture the structural diversity of African-language syntax.
Subjects:
Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.12708 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2606.12708v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.12708
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Happy Buzaaba [view email] [v1] Wed, 10 Jun 2026 21:55:02 UTC (119 KB)
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