Towards an adequate account of parataxis in Universal Dependencies

What it is about

The UD relation parataxis is general, and it is hard to tell apart from conj and appos. The paper shows how annotators have used it, with the parallel PUD treebanks as data. The English PUD has 97 parataxis instances in 1000 sentences: 44 side-by-side sentences, 42 reported speech, 8 parentheticals and 3 other cases. Across the 14 PUD treebanks that have more than ten instances, the counts vary a lot, even though the translations should share structure. Swedish keeps 86 of the 97 English instances but adds many where English uses hypotactic relations. The paper proposes narrower guidelines, for example forbidding parataxis for argument-like cases unless a word is elided.

Ideas

• I1. en ud-check: flag parataxis arcs and sort them into the paper's subtypes (side-by-side, reported speech, parenthetical). Anything outside these types is reported. Measure the counts per subtype on EWT and on the English PUD, which is for tests only.
• I2. en/src/parse.rs: build a confusion table of parataxis against conj and appos on EWT dev. Report the precision of the parser's parataxis arcs before changing any feature.
• I3. en/src/udreg.rs: add the paper's subtypes as a stricter check in the UD registry gate, so new parataxis labels need a subtype. Count how many current EWT arcs would fail the gate.

For Mova

The chapters are 24. Coordination and subordination (conj against parataxis) and 29. Ellipsis, word order and information structure (elided material). The code is en/src/parse.rs, en/src/udreg.rs and en ud-check. Measure first: the subtype counts of parataxis on EWT test, against the current LAS of 79.8.

Topics: Universal Dependencies · Treebanks

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/w19-8011

@inproceedings{ahrenberg2019adequate,
  title = {{Towards an adequate account of parataxis in Universal Dependencies}},
  author = {Ahrenberg, Lars},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2019)},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/w19-8011},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w19-8011}
}

References

10 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Miriam Connor, Natalia Silveira, Samuel R. Bowman, Timothy Dozat and Christopher D. Manning. 2013. More constructions, more genres: Extending Stanford dependencies. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Dependency Linguistics. find our card
2. Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Timothy Dozat, Natalia Silveira, Katri Haverinen, Filip Ginter, Joakim Nivre and Christopher D. Manning. 2014. Universal Stanford Dependencies: A cross-linguistic typology. Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’14).… find our card
3. Kim Gerdes and Sylvain Kahane. 2017. Trois schémas d’annotation syntaxique en dépendance pour un même corpus de français oral: le cas de la macrosyntaxe. Actes de la 24e conférence sur le traitement automatique des langues (TALN), Atelier sur les corpus annotés du français (ACor4French), Orléans. find
4. M. A. K. Halliday 1985. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. Edward Arnold. find
5. P. H. Matthews 1981. Syntax. Cambridge University Press. find
6. Timothy Osborne and Kim Gerdes. 2019. The status of function words in dependency grammar: A critique of Universal Dependencies (UD). Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 4(1): 17. 1–28. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/gigl.537. ↗
7. Manuela Sanguinetti, Cristina Bosco, Alberto Lavelli, Alessandro Mazzei, Oronzo Antonelli and Fabio Tamburini. PoSTWITA-UD: an Italian Twitter Treebank in Universal Dependencies. Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-2018). https://www.aclweb… ↗
8. Jennette Winterson 1997. Gut symmetries. Granta Books, London. find
9. Daniel Zeman, Martin Popel, Milan Straka, ..., and Josie Li 2017. find
10. CoNLL 2017 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies. Proceedings of the CoNLL 2017 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies, Vancouver, Canada, 3–4 August 2017. Association for Computational Linguistics. find our card

This page in Markdown → https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ud-2019-ahrenberg-adequate-account-parataxis-universal-dependencies/