Nested Coordination in Universal Dependencies

What it is about

The paper asks whether UD can tell apart the different nestings of a coordination such as "Tom and Jerry and Scooby-Doo": a flat ternary structure, or a binary one whose first or second conjunct is itself a coordination. UD gives the same basic tree to the flat and left-nested readings and a different one to the right-nested reading, so the basic layer cannot express the difference. The data are a short argument rather than an experiment: the authors count about a dozen nested coordinations in over 17,000 sentences of the UD Polish-LFG treebank, nearly all with a contrastive "but", which is strictly binary and so disambiguates the case in practice. They then propose two changes to the enhanced graph that keep the basic tree unchanged: one makes each conjunct the head of the coordination's dependents, which separates the nestings in a single enhanced graph but departs from current UD practice; the other distributes only the dependencies from the coordinate structure to its conjuncts, which keeps the enhanced graph a superset of the basic tree. They reject enriched labels, because the label set would grow without bound.

Ideas

• I1. en/src/convert.rs and the gold EWT trees: count nested coordinations and how many of them contain a contrastive binary conjunct, to measure the problem before any change; report the count per treebank, EWT only (GUM is test only).
• I2. treebanks/en/ mova-dialect converters: store the nesting in MISC as an enrichment (not in the basic tree), so that prag and world can recover the binary grouping; measure that converting EWT to the dialect and back is still identical.
• I3. en/src/udreg.rs gate for coordination: flag a flat chain of three or more conjuncts with a contrastive cc ("but") as ambiguous; metric: violations per 1k sentences, as treeagree check counts gate violations.

For Mova

This touches 24. Coordination and subordination and 22-phrases.md. The code is en/src/convert.rs and the prag/world reading of conjuncts (a nested conjunct is a separate frame anchor). Measure the counts first on EWT; the proposal is a representation change, so keep the basic trees as they are.

Topics: Universal Dependencies · Treebanks

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/w19-8007

@inproceedings{przepiorkowski2019nested,
  title = {{Nested Coordination in Universal Dependencies}},
  author = {Przepiórkowski, Adam and Patejuk, Agnieszka},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2019)},
  year = {2019},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/w19-8007},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w19-8007}
}

References

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