📄 Proceedings of the Universal Dependencies Brazilian Festival

Summary

This is the front matter of the proceedings of the UDFest-BR 2022 workshop. The event took place on 21 March 2022, co-located with the 15th PROPOR conference on the computational processing of the Portuguese language. The workshop aimed to bring together researchers working with the Universal Dependencies (UD) model and its adaptation to Portuguese. Participants discussed annotation approaches, typical difficulties and ways of overcoming them. The organizers explain that UD makes it possible to build fairly accurate taggers and parsers from treebanks and machine learning. At the same time, in their view, UD research for Portuguese is still at an early stage. The proceedings include six papers of three types: theoretical studies, reports on corpus annotation, and software tools for working with UD. The front matter contains no experiments or numerical results of its own; it only describes the event and its programme. For Mova, this is a useful example of how a national community purposefully builds UD resources and tools for its language.

Key points

• The workshop was held as part of the POeTiSA project. The project belongs to the NLP2 initiative of the C4AI center at the University of São Paulo and is funded by IBM and FAPESP.
• According to the organizers, at that time there were about 200 UD corpora for more than 100 languages.
• The papers cover the following topics:
  • annotation of non-canonical literary text, using the novel "Grande sertão: veredas" as an example;
  • the ambiguous annotation of the word que;
  • the question of how much revision treebanks require;
  • shallow parsing;
  • the status of the indirect object and adverbial relations in Portuguese UD.
• The tools presented include UDConcord (Miranda, Pardo), a concordancer for searching UD treebanks.
• Organizers: Thiago A. S. Pardo (USP), Ariani Di Felippo (UFSCar) and Norton Trevisan Roman (USP). The programme committee included, among others, Joakim Nivre and Daniel Zeman.