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).
Ideas
- I1.
en ud-evalwith recoverability: check that the tokens of every output sentence rejoin exactly to the raw text, using the SpaceAfter and MISC conventions ofen/src/tok.rs; measure the share of sentences that fail on EWT test, which should be zero. - I2.
en ud-evalcore-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.
treeagreegates: check that auxiliaries and copulas depend on a lexical predicate, which is the paper's design rule; measure how oftenauxorcoparcs point the other way in silver trees, per 1k sentences, withtreeagree 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 theencrate writes, and report any that only exist in the mova dialect.
For Mova
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 (The Mova dialect: a UD metadialect, treebanks, and converters). 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.
Cite
@inproceedings{nivre2016universal,
title = {{Universal Dependencies v1: A Multilingual Treebank Collection}},
author = {Nivre, Joakim and Marneffe, Marie-Catherine de and Ginter, Filip and Goldberg, Yoav and Hajič, Jan and Manning, Christopher D. and McDonald, Ryan and Petrov, Slav and Pyysalo, Sampo and Silveira, Natalia and Tsarfaty, Reut and Zeman, Daniel},
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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