A Proposal for a More Universal Annotation of Relative Clauses in Universal Dependencies

What it is about

The authors argue that the current UD encoding of relative clauses, the relation acl:relcl plus PronType=Rel on a relative pronoun, fits European relativization but not other strategies. They show that 21% of the 339 UD 2.17 treebanks (210 with at least 1k tokens) have neither acl:relcl nor PronType=Rel in adnominal clauses. They propose an encoding that marks the clause itself as a relative clause, shows the relativized position as a gap or a resumptive element, and treats head-internal, free and participial relatives in a common way. The proposal is applied to examples from Mandarin, Japanese, Basque, Turkish, Wolof and English, including participial clauses. The paper gives no parser scores; its evidence is typological and annotation-level.

Ideas

• I1. Count the English relative clauses in en/src/convert.rs output: how many EWT and GUM acl clauses carry a relativized gap and how many carry PronType=Rel, and use that count to decide whether a ClauseType=Rel feature in the mova dialect is worth adding (no LAS change is expected on EWT test).
• I2. Participial clauses as relatives: in prag, let a participial acl (the man sitting there) share the antecedent event rule with finite relatives, and measure the correct antecedent link in world on 100 hand-checked EWT sentences.
• I3. Registry warning: add a check to en/src/udreg.rs that counts relative clauses without relcl or PronType=Rel in the training banks, and report the share for the banks in treebanks/en/, the way the paper reports 21% for UD 2.17.
• I4. Pure relativizers: for English that and zero relatives, measure how often en labels the relativizer with a relative-clause relation, and report the share of errors in mark versus mark:rel on EWT test.

For Mova

The converter and the dialect are en/src/convert.rs and The Mova dialect: a UD metadialect, treebanks, and converters; the relativizer lexicon is in en/seeds/lexicon. The chapter that the ideas touch is 25. Relative clauses, and 22-phrases.md for participial clauses. Measure first: the share of English acl clauses with a relativized gap that the mova dialect marks as relative.

Topics: Universal Dependencies · Treebanks

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/33mr2csukeo5

@inproceedings{herrera2026proposal,
  title = {{A Proposal for a More Universal Annotation of Relative Clauses in Universal Dependencies}},
  author = {Herrera, Santiago and Kahane, Sylvain},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2026)},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/33mr2csukeo5},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/33mr2csukeo5}
}

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