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Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection

Summary

Universal Dependencies (UD) is an open community project. Its goal is to annotate treebanks for many languages according to shared principles, making it easier to build multilingual syntactic parsers and to study cross-lingual transfer. The paper describes the second version of the guidelines (UD v2) and explains how it differs from UD v1. The annotation scheme is lexicalist and based on dependency grammar. Text is first divided into syntactic words: clitics are split off and contracted forms are decomposed. Each word then receives a lemma, a universal part-of-speech tag and morphological features. Syntax is represented as a dependency tree in which relations between content words, rather than function words, take precedence. The set of universal categories is fixed, but individual languages may add their own relation subtypes and language-specific features. In v2, spaces were allowed within words, the inventory of features was expanded, the rules for several tags were clarified, and the enhanced representation was refined. The authors also survey the treebanks available for 90 languages. UD served as the basis for the CoNLL 2017 and 2018 shared tasks, which gave rise to parsers that analyze raw text in many languages.

Key points

  • The annotation has three layers: segmentation into syntactic words (multiword tokens), morphology (lemma, one of 17 UPOS tags, features) and syntax (37 universal relation types). Relations are divided into clausal and nominal ones, and within the clause into core arguments and other dependents. Subtypes such as nsubj:pass and aux:pass are added by individual languages.
  • Main changes in v2: the CONJ tag was renamed CCONJ. Spaces within words are now allowed for languages such as Vietnamese, and in other languages only for a restricted list of cases (numbers, abbreviations). New features (Clusivity, Evident, NounClass, Polite, Abbr, Foreign, Typo) and new values were added, and some were renamed (Negative → Polarity, Trans → Conv).
  • Scale: the project started in 2014 and has more than 300 contributors. It covers 90 languages, and the number of treebanks grew more than fourfold from UD v1.2 to v2.5. The LINDAT repository recorded 46,439 downloads (as of November 2019).
  • The scheme grew out of three earlier systems: (universal) Stanford dependencies, the Google universal tags and Interset.
  • The CoNLL 2017 and CoNLL 2018 shared tasks were run on UD data. Between them, LAS rose noticeably for most languages, especially where data had been added.

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

Topics: Universal Dependencies · Treebanks · Multilingual & cross-lingual NLP

Cite

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

@inproceedings{nivre2020universal,
  title = {{Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection}},
  author = {Nivre, Joakim and Marneffe, Marie-Catherine de and Ginter, Filip},
  booktitle = {LREC 2020 (Marseille)},
  year = {2020},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.497/}
}

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