📄 Universal Dependencies v1: A Multilingual Treebank Collection

What it is about

The paper is the reference for the first UD release. It sets out the design principles: dependency-based and lexicalist annotation, the recoverability principle (every syntactic word must map back to the raw text), content words as the backbone of the tree with function words as dependents, and a closed inventory of 17 POS tags, the morphological features, and 40 relations. Language-specific subtypes such as acl:relcl may be added and can always be stripped to the core label. The v1.2 release (November 2015) has 37 treebanks in 33 languages, with statistics per treebank (sentences, tokens, lemmas, features, relations). The authors also describe the CoNLL-U format, the validation tools and the enhanced representation, which was then used by only one treebank (Finnish).

For Mova

• I1. en ud-eval with recoverability: check that the tokens of every output sentence rejoin exactly to the raw text, using the SpaceAfter and MISC conventions of en/src/tok.rs; measure the share of sentences that fail on EWT test, which should be zero.
• I2. en ud-eval core-label score: strip the subtype after the colon from both gold and output and report LAS beside the full LAS, to show how much of the loss comes from subtyping (acl:relcl, nmod:poss); measure the difference on EWT test.
• I3. treeagree gates: check that auxiliaries and copulas depend on a lexical predicate, which is the paper's design rule; measure how often aux or cop arcs point the other way in silver trees, per 1k sentences, with treeagree check.
• I4. en/src/udreg.rs: the paper's 17 POS tags and 40 relations are the historical base of the registry; check that the registry gate accepts every relation and feature the en crate writes, and report any that only exist in the mova dialect.

Touches languages/en/20-syntax-overview, 10-word-classes, 12-pronouns-determiners-numerals and 13-verbs, and the en crate (udreg.rs, tok.rs, ud.rs), tools/treeagree and the mova dialect (docs/dialect.md). This is a background paper: its numbers are the UD v1 baseline, not Mova targets. Measure first the recoverability check (I1), because it is cheap and it fails loudly.

🏛️ Institutions

🏢GoogleMountain View · United States272 works · 255,532 citations🎓Stanford UniversityStanford · United States248 works · 214,804 citations🎓University of CambridgeCambridge · United Kingdom119 works · 110,950 citations🎓Charles UniversityPrague · Czechia99 works · 18,879 citations🎓Bar-Ilan UniversityRamat Gan · Israel102 works · 17,587 citations🎓The Ohio State UniversityColumbus · United States46 works · 16,163 citations🎓Uppsala UniversityUppsala · Sweden46 works · 11,454 citations🎓University of TurkuTurku · Finland11 works · 4,024 citations🎓Weizmann Institute of ScienceRehovot · Israel7 works · 2,300 citations🎓Open University of IsraelRaanana · Israel13 works · 2,012 citations

Also on the byline: Information Technology University.

Topics🌐 Universal Dependencies🗂️ Treebanks🌍 Multilingual & cross-lingual NLP

Cite

Cite as Joakim Nivre, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Filip Ginter, Yoav Goldberg, Jan Hajič, Christopher D. Manning, Ryan McDonald, Slav Petrov, Sampo Pyysalo, Natalia Silveira, Reut Tsarfaty and Daniel Zeman. 2016. Universal Dependencies v1: A Multilingual Treebank Collection. Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16).

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/2hnj7od8afy8

@inproceedings{nivre2016universal,
  title = {{Universal Dependencies v1: A Multilingual Treebank Collection}},
  author = {Joakim Nivre, Marie-Catherine {de Marneffe}, Filip Ginter, Yoav Goldberg, Jan Hajič, Christopher D. Manning, Ryan McDonald, Slav Petrov, Sampo Pyysalo, Natalia Silveira, Reut Tsarfaty and Daniel Zeman},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.63317/2hnj7od8afy8},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2hnj7od8afy8}
}

References

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