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Head-initial and head-Final coordinate structures in two annotation schemes of dependency grammar

What it is about

UD and SUD both treat coordinate structures as head-initial, but they differ for three or more conjuncts: UD attaches every later conjunct to the first one (a bouquet), while SUD chains them (each conjunct depends on the one before). The author argues for a more flexible account, in which a coordination is head-initial inside a head-initial structure and head-final inside a head-final one, as in German or Japanese. Two arguments are given for the flexible view: dependency distance, since attaching the shared head to the nearest conjunct shortens dependencies (one example drops from a mean dependency distance of 1.38 to 0.88), and a nearness effect in case concord and agreement. The paper also refutes two arguments made for the strictly head-initial account. It is a theoretical and annotation-level argument without parser scores.

Ideas

For Mova

The coordination logic sits in en/src/parse.rs and in the treeagree rules (tools/treeagree/src/rules.rs), and en/src/ud.rs decides the UPOS of the coordinator. The chapter that the ideas touch is 24. Coordination and subordination. Measure first: the MDD of conjunct structures in EWT under the two encodings, since it needs no parser training.

Topics: Dependency parsing

Cite

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

@inproceedings{osborne2025head,
  title = {{Head-initial and head-Final coordinate structures in two annotation schemes of dependency grammar}},
  author = {Osborne, Timothy John and Song, Chenchen},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2025)},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2025.depling-1.6/}
}

References

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