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Universal Dependencies

Summary

The article describes the linguistic theory underlying Universal Dependencies (UD). UD is a morphosyntactic annotation scheme suitable for languages of very different typology. The authors argue that UD is a coherent approach rather than an arbitrary collection of practical compromises. This approach draws on the functional-typological tradition. The description rests on three types of units: nominals denote entities, clauses denote events, and modifiers specify them. The word, not the morpheme, is taken as the basic unit. Words are linked by typed grammatical relations in a dependency tree. The head in this tree is the content word, while function words (auxiliaries, prepositions, copulas) depend on it. The authors examine a wide range of constructions using examples from many languages. They also show separately how core arguments are encoded in different languages. This design increases parallelism both across languages and within a single language. It also makes predicate-argument structure more transparent for downstream processing. This matters because consistent annotation is needed for multilingual and cross-lingual parsing and for typological research.

Key points

  • As of release v2.7 (November 2020), UD comprised 183 treebanks for 104 languages from 416 contributors. Over six years, the project grew from 10 treebanks.
  • Three fundamental phrasal units: nominals, clauses and modifiers. The relation label indicates the type of the dependent (nmod, amod or acl, as well as obl or nmod), so the phrase type can be recovered without separate annotation.
  • Words are the basic units in accordance with the lexical integrity principle. Clitics, such as English 's, are split off as separate words even when the orthography does not separate them.
  • The basic representation is a tree with content words as heads. The enhanced representation is a directed graph with additional implicit relations, for example for conjuncts, control and raising.
  • UD has had a substantial impact on research. It served as the basis for the CoNLL shared tasks of 2017 and 2018, in which parsers processed raw text for many languages. UD is also used in cross-lingual and semantic parsing, psycholinguistics, and research on word order typology.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Linguistics & languages

TopicsUniversal Dependencies

Institutions

🎓Stanford UniversityStanford · United States248 works · 214,804 citations🎓Charles UniversityPrague · Czechia99 works · 18,879 citations🎓The Ohio State UniversityColumbus · United States46 works · 16,163 citations🎓Uppsala UniversityUppsala · Sweden46 works · 11,454 citations

Cite

Cite as Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Christopher D. Manning, Joakim Nivre and Daniel Zeman. 2021. Universal Dependencies. Computational Linguistics.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1162/coli_a_00402

@article{marneffe2021universal,
  title = {{Universal Dependencies}},
  author = {Marie-Catherine {de Marneffe}, Christopher D. Manning, Joakim Nivre and Daniel Zeman},
  journal = {Computational Linguistics},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.1162/coli\_a\_00402},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00402}
}

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