Mova0.5 pre-release⌕
☰
home / docs / papers / Universal Dependencies

Universal Dependencies

Summary

This article sets out the linguistic theory behind Universal Dependencies (UD), which is at once a cross-linguistically consistent morphosyntactic annotation scheme, an open research community and a growing collection of treebanks. The authors argue that UD is not a loose set of practical compromises but a coherent theory grounded in typologically oriented grammatical traditions. The paper presents no new data or models; instead it explains the principles of UD version 2: the word as the basic unit, a dependency tree with typed grammatical relations, three kinds of phrasal units (nominals, clauses, modifiers), and content words as heads with function words attached to them. Many constructions are discussed with examples from diverse languages, with special attention to core arguments in typologically distant languages. The authors show how the design balances linguistic adequacy, simplicity and usability by non-specialists, and conclude that it suits parallel annotation across languages, multilingual parsing and typological research.

How Mova uses it

Effectiveness in Mova

Background reading; not measured separately. The nummod rule it is cited in holds on UD English EWT 2.18 without violations (nummod before NOUN/PROPN — 1,433 of 1,433; nummod on NUM — 1,794 of 1,794; GUM: 3 and 2 violations).

👨‍🔬💥

Topics: Universal Dependencies

Cite

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

@inproceedings{marneffe2021universal,
  title = {{Universal Dependencies}},
  author = {Marneffe, Marie-Catherine de and Manning, Christopher D. and Nivre, Joakim and Zeman, Daniel},
  booktitle = {Computational Linguistics 47(2): 255–308},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.1162/coli\_a\_00402},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00402}
}

References

87 references, 9 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Agić, Željko. 2017. Cross-lingual parser selection for low-resource languages. In Proceedings of the NoDaLiDa 2017 Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2017), pages 1–10, Göteborg. find
  2. Andrews, Avery D. 2007. The major functions of the noun phrase. In Timothy Shopen, editor, Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Volume I: Clause Structure, Cambridge University Press, pages 132–223. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511619427.003 ↗
  3. Aronoff, Mark. 2007. In the beginning was the word. Language, 83:803–830. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2008.0042 ↗
  4. Badawi, Elsaid, M. G. Carter, and Adrian Gully. 2013. Modern Written Arabic: A Comprehensive Grammar. Routledge, London/New York. https://doi.org/10 .4324/9780203351758 ↗
  5. Baker, Collin F., Charles J. Fillmore, and John B. Lowe. 1998. The Berkeley FrameNet project. In 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Volume 1, pages 86–90, Montreal. https://doi.org/10.3115/980845.980860 ↗ our card
  6. Black, Ezra, Roger Garside, and Geoffrey Leech, editors. 1993. Statistically-Driven Computer Grammars of English: The IBM/Lancaster Approach. Rodopi, Amsterdam. find
  7. Blevins, James P. 2006. Word-based morphology. Journal of Linguistics, 42:531–573. https://doi.org/10 .1017/S0022226706004191 ↗
  8. Blevins, James P., Farrell Ackerman, and Robert Malouf. 2017. Word and paradigm morphology. In Jenny Audring and Francesca Masini, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Morphological Theory. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pages 265–284. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199668984.013.22 ↗
  9. Boneh, Nora and Léa Nash. 2012. Core and non-core datives in French. In Beatriz Fernández and Ricardo Etxepare, editors, Variation in Datives. Oxford University Press, Oxford. pages 22–49. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937363.003.0002 ↗
  10. Bouma, Gosse, Jan Hajič, Dag Haug, Joakim Nivre, Per Erik Solberg, and Lilja Øvrelid. 2018. Expletives in Universal Dependency Treebanks. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018), pages 18–26, Bruxelles. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W18 -6003 ↗
  11. Bresnan, Joan, Ash Asudeh, Ida Toivonen, and Stephen Wechsler. 2016. Lexical-Functional Syntax, 2nd edition. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119105664 ↗
  12. Bresnan, Joan and Sam A. Mchombo. 1995. The lexical integrity principle: Evidence from Bantu. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 13:181–254. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00992782 ↗
  13. Chomsky, Noam. 1970. Remarks on nominalization. In Roderick A. Jacobs and Peter S. Rosenbaum, editors, Readings in English Transformational Grammar. Ginn and Co., pages 11–61. find
  14. Comrie, Bernhard. 1981. Language Universals and Linguistic Typology: Syntax and Morphology. Basil Blackwell, Oxford. find
  15. Croft, William. 1991. Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations: The Cognitive Organization of Information. University of Chicago Press. find
  16. Croft, William. 2001. Radical Construction Grammar: Syntactic Theory in Typological Perspective. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198299554.001.0001 ↗
  17. Croft, William. 2002. Typology and Universals, second edition, Cambridge University Press. Croft, William. forthcoming. Morphosyntax: Constructions of the World’s Languages. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. find
  18. Dahlstrom, Amy. 1991. Plains Cree Morphosyntax. Garland, New York. find
  19. Dalrymple, Mary. 2001. Lexical-Functional Grammar. Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1163/9781849500104 ↗
  20. De Guzman, Videa. 1988. Ergative analysis for Philippine languages: An analysis. In Richard McGinn, editor, Studies in Austronesian Linguistics. Ohio University Center for International Studies, Athens, OH, pages 323–345. de Marneffe, Marie Catherine, Miryam de Lhoneux, Joakim Nivre, and Sebastian Schuster, editors. 2020. Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2020). Online. https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/2020.udw-1.0. de Marneffe, Marie Catherine, Teresa Lynn, and Sebastian Schuster, editors. 2018. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018). Bruxelles. de Marneffe, Marie Catherine, Joakim Nivre, and Sebastian Schuster, editors. 2017. Proceedings of the NoDaLiDa 2017 Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2017). Göteborg. ↗
  21. Dione, Cheikh Bamba. 2019. Developing Universal Dependencies for Wolof. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2019), pages 12–23, Paris. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W19-8003 ↗
  22. Dixon, R. M. W. 1972. The Dyirbal Language of North Queensland. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139084987 ↗
  23. Dixon, R. M. W. 1994. Ergativity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. find
  24. Dixon, R. M. W. 2009. Basic Linguistic Theory. Volume 1: Methodology. Oxford University Press. find
  25. Dryer, Matthew S. 2007. Word order. In Timothy Shopen, editor, Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Volume I: Clause Structure, second edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pages 61–131. https://doi.org/10 .1017/CBO9780511619427.002 ↗
  26. Farrar, Scott and D. Terence Langendoen. 2003. A linguistic ontology for the semantic Web. GLOT International, 7:97–100. find
  27. Fischer, Wolfdietrich. 1997. Classical Arabic. In Robert Hetzron, editor, The Semitic Languages, Routledge, London/New York, pages 187–219. find
  28. Foley, William A. 2007. A typology of information packaging in the clause. In Timothy Shopen, editor, Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Volume I: Clause Structure, second edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pages 362–446. https://doi.org/10 .1017/CBO9780511619427.007 ↗
  29. Futrell, Richard, Kyle Mahowald, and Edward Gibson. 2015. Large-scale evidence of dependency length minimization in 37 languages. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 112(33):10336–10341. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1502134112, PubMed: 26240370 ↗
  30. Gerdes, Kim, Bruno Guillaume, Sylvain Kahane, and Guy Perrier. 2018. SUD or surface-syntactic Universal Dependencies: An annotation scheme near-isomorphic to UD. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018), pages 66–74, Bruxelles. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W18-6008 ↗
  31. Gerdes, Kim and Sylvain Kahane. 2016. Dependency annotation choices: Assessing theoretical and practical issues of universal dependencies. In Proceedings of LAW X – The 10th Linguistic Annotation Workshop, pages 131–140, Berlin. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/W16-1715 ↗
  32. Gerdts, Donna. 1988. Antipassives and causatives in Ilokano: Evidence for an ergative analysis. In Richard McGinn, editor, Studies in Austronesian Linguistics, Ohio University Center for International Studies, Athens, OH, pages 323–345. find
  33. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. Some universals of grammar with particular reference to the order of meaningful elements. In Joseph H. Greenberg, editor, Universals of Human Language, MIT Press, pages 73–113. find
  34. Grimshaw, Jane. 1991 [2005]. Extended projection. Ms., Brandeis University. Appears in Jane Grimshaw (2005), Words and Structure. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, pages 1–74. find
  35. Guilfoyle, Eichne, Henrietta Hung, and Lisa Travis. 1992. Spec of IP and Spec of VP: Two subjects in Austronesian languages. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 10:375–414. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133368 ↗
  36. Haspelmath, Martin. 2001. Word classes and parts of speech. In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier Science, pages 16538–16545. https://doi.org/10.1016/B0-08-043076-7/02959-4 ↗
  37. Haspelmath, Martin. 2011a. The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax. Folia Linguistica, 45:31–80. https://doi.org/10.1515/flin.2011.002 ↗
  38. Haspelmath, Martin. 2011b. On S, A, P, T, and R as comparative concepts for alignment typology. Lingustic Typology, 15:535–567. https://doi.org/10.1515/LITY.2011.035 ↗
  39. Haspelmath, Martin. 2014. Arguments and adjuncts as language-particular syntactic categories and as comparative concepts. Linguistic Discovery, 12(2):3–11. https://doi.org/10.1349/PS1.1537 -0852.A.442 ↗
  40. Haspelmath, Martin. 2015. Ditransitive constructions. Annual Review of Linguistics, 1:19–41. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguist-030514-125204 ↗
  41. Haspelmath, Martin. 2019. Indexing and flagging, and head and dependent marking. Te Reo, 62(1):93–115. find
  42. Hayes, David G. 1964. Dependency theory: A formalism and some observations. Language, 40(4):511–525. https://doi.org/10.2307/411934 ↗
  43. Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2005. The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar: Typological characteristics. In Alexander Adelaar and Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, editors, The Austronesian Languages of Asia and Madagascar. Routledge, London/New York, pages 110–181. find
  44. Hopper, Paul J. and Elizabeth Traugott. 2003. Grammaticalization. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139165525 ↗
  45. Huddleston, Rodney and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 2002. The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10 .1017/9781316423530 ↗ our card
  46. Hudson, Richard A. 1984. Word Grammar. Blackwell. find
  47. Hudson, Richard A. 1990. English Word Grammar. Blackwell. find
  48. Kaplan, Ron and Joan Bresnan. 1982. Lexical-Functional Grammar: A formal system for grammatical representation. In Joan Bresnan, editor, The Mental Representation of Grammatical Relations, MIT Press, pages 173–281. find
  49. Kayne, Richard S. 1984. Connectedness and Binary Branching. Foris Publications, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111682228 ↗
  50. Kondratyuk, Daniel and Milan Straka. 2019. 75 languages, 1 model: Parsing Universal Dependencies universally. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing, pages 2779–2795, Hong Kong. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D19-1279 ↗ our card
  51. Kroeger, Paul R. 1993. Phrase Structure and Grammatical Relations in Tagalog. Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA, USA. find
  52. Ladusaw, William A. 1988. A proposed distinction between levels and strata: In Linguistics in the Morning Calm 2: Selected Papers from SICOL-1986. The Linguistic Society of Korea, Hanshin, Seoul. find
  53. Levshina, Natalia. 2019. Token-based typology and word order entropy: A study based on universal dependencies. Linguistic Typology, 23(3):533–572. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2019-0025 ↗
  54. Manning, Christopher D. 1996. Ergativity: Argument Structure and Grammatical Relations. CSLI Publications, Stanford, CA. find
  55. Marcus, Mitchell P., Beatrice Santorini, and Mary Ann Marcinkiewicz. 1993. Building a large annotated corpus of English: The Penn Treebank. Computational Linguistics, 19:313–330. https://doi.org/10.21236/ADA273556 ↗ our card
  56. Mel’čuk, Igor. 1988. Dependency Syntax: Theory and Practice. State University of New York Press. find
  57. Milicevic, Jasmina. 2006. A short guide to the Meaning-Text linguistic theory. Journal of Koralex, 8:187–233. find
  58. Naranjo, Matías Guzmán and Laura Becker. 2018. Quantitative word order typology with UD. In Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories (TLT 2018), pages 91–104, Oslo. find
  59. Nivre, Joakim, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Filip Ginter, Yoav Goldberg, Jan Hajič, Christopher D. Manning, Ryan McDonald, Slav Petrov, Sampo Pyysalo, Natalia Silveira, Reut Tsarfaty, and Dan Zeman. 2016. Universal Dependencies v1: A multilingual treebank collection. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), Portoroz̃. find our card
  60. Nivre, Joakim, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Filip Ginter, Jan Hajič, Christopher D. Manning, Sampo Pyysalo, Sebastian Schuster, Francis Tyers, and Daniel Zeman. 2020. Universal Dependencies v2: An evergrowing multilingual treebank collection. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 4027–4036. Online. find our card
  61. Osborne, Timothy and Kim Gerdes. 2019. The status of function words in dependency grammar: A critique of Universal Dependencies (UD). Glossa, 4(1):17.1–28. https://doi.org/10 .5334/gjgl.537 ↗
  62. Oyharçabal, Bernard. 2003. Lexical causatives and causative alternation in Basque. In Bernard Oyharçabal, editor, Inquiries into the Syntax-Lexicon relations in Basque, number XLVI in Supplements of ASJU. Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea, pages 223–253. find
  63. Palmer, Martha, Daniel Gildea, and Paul Kingsbury. 2005. The proposition bank. Computational Linguistics, 31:71–106. https://doi.org/10.1162/0891201053630264 ↗
  64. Payne, Thomas. 1982. Role and reference related subject properties and ergativity in Yup’ik Eskimo and Tagalog. Studies in Language, 6:75–106. https://doi.org/10.1075/sl.6.1.05pay Perlmutter, Davd M., editor. 1983. Studies in Relational Grammar. The University of Chicago Press. ↗
  65. Pineda, Anna. 2013. Romance double object constructions and transitivity alternations. In Proceedings of ConSOLE XX, pages 185–211, Leipzig. find
  66. Pollard, Carl and Ivan A. Sag. 1994. Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. CSLI Publications. find
  67. Przepiórkowski, Adam. 2016. How Not to distinguish arguments from adjuncts in LFG. In Proceedings of the Joint 2016 Conference on Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar, pages 560–580, Warszawa. find
  68. Rademaker, Alexandre and Francis Tyers, editors. 2019. Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2019). Paris. find
  69. Reddy, Siva, Oscar Täckström, Slav Petrov, Mark Steedman, and Mirella Lapata. 2017. Universal semantic parsing. In Proceedings of the Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 89–101, Copenhagen. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D17-1009 ↗
  70. Sag, Ivan A., Timothy Baldwin, Francis Bond, Ann Copestake, and Dan Flickinger. 2002. Multiword expressions: A pain in the neck for NLP. In Proceedings of CICLing, pages 1–15, Mexico City. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45715-1_1 ↗ our card
  71. Schachter, Paul and Timothy Shopen. 2007. Part-of-speech systems. In Timothy Shopen, editor, Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Volume I: Clause Structure, Cambridge University Press, second edition. Cambridge, pages 1–60. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511619427.001 ↗
  72. Sgall, Petr, Eva Hajičová, and Jarmila Panevová. 1986. The Meaning of the Sentence in Its Pragmatic Aspects. Reidel. find
  73. Spencer, Andrew and Ana R. Luís. 2012. Clitics: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. find
  74. Stump, Gregory T. 2001. Inflectional Morphology: A Theory of Paradigm Structure. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486333 ↗
  75. Sylak-Glassman, John, Christo Kirov, David Yarowsky, and Roger Que. 2015. A language-independent feature schema for inflectional morphology. In Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 674–680, Beijing. https://doi.org/10.3115/v1/P15-2111 ↗
  76. Tesnière, Lucien. 1959. Éléments de syntaxe structurale. Editions Klincksieck, Paris. find
  77. Tesnière, Lucien. 2015 [1959]. Elements of Structural Syntax. Translation by Timothy Osborne and Sylvain Kahane of Tesnière (1959). John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.185 ↗
  78. Thompson, Sandra A. 1997. Discourse motivations for the core-oblique distinction as a language universal. In Akio Kamio, editor, Directions in Functional Linguistics. John Benjamins, pages 59–82. https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.36.06tho ↗
  79. Tiedemann, Jörg. 2015. Cross-lingual dependency parsing with Universal Dependencies and predicted PoS labels. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling), pages 340–349, Uppsala. find
  80. Van Peteghem, Marleen. 2006. Le datif en français: un cas structural. Journal of French Language Studies, 16:93–110. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959269506002286 ↗
  81. Van Valin, Jr., Robert D., editor. 1993. Advances in Role and Reference Grammar. John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10 .1075/cilt.82 ↗
  82. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality. MIT Press. find
  83. Wolvengrey, Arok Elessar. 2011. Semantic and pragmatic functions in Plains Cree syntax. Ph.D. thesis, LOT, Utrecht, Netherlands. find
  84. Zeman, Daniel, Jan Hajič, Martin Popel, Martin Potthast, Milan Straka, Filip Ginter, Joakim Nivre, and Slav Petrov. 2018. CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. In Proceedings of the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies, pages 1–21, Bruxelles. find our card
  85. Zeman, Daniel, Martin Popel, Milan Straka, Jan Hajič, Joakim Nivre, Filip Ginter, Juhani Luotolahti, Sampo Pyysalo, Slav Petrov, Martin Potthast, Francis Tyers, Elena Badmaeva, Memduh Gökırmak, Anna Nedoluzhko, Silvie Cinková, Jan Hajič jr., Jaroslava Hlaváčová, Václava Kettnerová, Zdeňka Urešová, Jenna Kanerva, et al. 2017. CoNLL 2017 shared task: Multilingual parsing from raw text to universal dependencies. In Proceedings of the CoNLL 2017 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies, pages 1–19, Vancouver. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/K17 -3001 ↗ our card
  86. Zwicky, Arnold M. and Geoffrey K. Pullum. 1983. Cliticization vs. inflection: English n’t. Language, 59:502–513. https://doi.org/10.2307/413900 ↗
  87. Zúñiga, Fernando and Beatriz Fernández. 2019. Grammatical relations in Basque. In Balthasar Bickel and Alena Witzlack-Makarevich, editors, Argument selectors: A new perspective on grammatical relations, Typological Studies in Language, volume 123 of Typological Studies in Language. John Benjamins, Amsterdam, pages 185–211. https://doi.org/10.1075/tsl.123 .06zun ↗

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/demarneffe-2021-universal-dependencies/