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Harmonizing Annotation of Turkic Postverbial Constructions: A Comparative Study of UD Treebanks

Summary

The paper examines how Turkic UD treebanks annotate postverbial constructions. These are combinations of a converb with an auxiliary verb, the postverb. Such combinations add aspectual or actional nuances to the action: suddenness, completeness, duration or approach to completion. The study was prompted by the difficulties the author encountered while building the first Uzbek UD corpus. She compared eleven treebanks of seven Turkic languages. They use four annotation strategies: advcl, xcomp/ccomp, aux and compound. Some corpora also mix approaches. Each strategy is assessed on several criteria: which word becomes the head, whether the annotation is consistent with the UD guidelines, and whether it is suitable for cross-linguistic comparison. No option fully captures the dual nature of the postverb. It is at once a grammatical marker and can be used as an independent predicate. The author considers compound the best basis. She proposes a separate language-specific subtype compound:postverb, modeled on the Hungarian compound:preverb. Consistent annotation is needed for typological research and cross-lingual NLP applications.

Key points

  • The study covers 11 treebanks for Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tatar, Turkish, Uyghur and Uzbek. The corpora contain from a few to about a hundred postverbial constructions: Turkish-BOUN ~100, Uyghur-UDT ~80, Uzbek-UT ~70.
  • The strategies are distributed as follows. advcl is used in Turkish-BOUN, Turkish-Penn, Turkish-Kenet and Turkish-GB. xcomp/ccomp is used in Kyrgyz-KTMU, Uyghur-UDT and Kazakh-KTB. aux is used in Azerbaijani-TueCL, Kyrgyz-TueCL and Tatar-NMCTT. compound is used only in Uzbek-UT.
  • advcl and xcomp/ccomp are the most widespread but contradict the UD guidelines: they wrongly present the converb as a subordinate clause. aux is appropriate when the postverb has truly lost its lexical meaning. In Uzbek, about 27 such verbs often retain their own meaning, so they are tagged as VERB rather than AUX.
  • Inconsistency occurs even within a single corpus. In Kyrgyz-KTMU, two postverbial combinations from the same sentence received different labels: advcl and ccomp.
  • The work is analytical; there are no quantitative experiments (LAS, etc.). As a next step, the author plans a shared task in the UD working group to test the proposed subtype compound:postverb.

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

Cite

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

@inproceedings{akhundjanova2025harmonizing,
  title = {{Harmonizing Annotation of Turkic Postverbial Constructions: A Comparative Study of UD Treebanks}},
  author = {Akhundjanova, Arofat},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Building and Using Comparable Corpora (BUCC)},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.bucc-1.2/}
}

References

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