In this paper we study the representation of negation in UD treebanks. We show that the existing annotations are often inconsistent with the guidelines and that there are ill-motivated differences in annotation of constructions across and even within languages. Moreover, we argue that even if the annotation of the two negation-related features (Polarity=Neg and PronType=Neg) were consistent, these two features would be inadequate for straightforwardly expressing the semantics of negation because they relate to the word level only and hence to form rather than meaning. We therefore propose to add two features, Negated=+ and DoubleNegated=+, which directly encode when a predicate is semantically under negation, and thereby allow a straightforward semantic interpretation of a UD parse in terms of negation.
CHILDES is a widely used resource of transcribed child and child-directed speech. This paper introduces UD-English-CHILDES, the first officially released Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank. It is derived from previously dependency-annotated CHILDES data, which we harmonize to follow unified annotation principles. The gold-standard trees encompass utterances sampled from 11 children and their caregivers, totaling over 48K sentences (236K tokens). We validate these gold-standard annotations under the UD v2 framework and provide an additional 1M silver-standard sentences, offering a consistent resource for computational and linguistic research.
In this paper, we discuss the challenges that we faced during the construction of a Universal Dependencies treebank for Abaza, a polysynthetic Northwest Caucasian language. We propose an alternative to the morpheme-level annotation of polysynthetic languages introduced in Park et al. (2021). Our approach aims at reducing the number of morphological features, yet providing all the necessary information for the comprehensive representation of all the syntactic relations. Besides, we suggest to add one language-specific relation needed for annotating repetitions in spoken texts and present several solutions that aim at increasing cross-linguistic comparability of our data.
This paper discusses the need for including morphological features in Japanese Universal Dependencies (UD). In the current version (v2.11) of the Japanese UD treebanks, sentences are tokenized at the morpheme level, and almost no morphological feature annotation is used. However, Japanese is not an isolating language that lacks morphological inflection but is an agglutinative language. Given this situation, we introduce a tentative scheme for retokenization and morphological feature annotation for Japanese UD. Then, we measure and compare the morphological complexity of Japanese with other languages to demonstrate that the proposed tokenizations show similarities to synthetic languages reflecting the linguistic typology.
This paper reports the development of the first dependency treebank for the Sinhala language (STB). Sinhala, which is morphologically rich, is a low-resource language with few linguistic and computational resources available publicly. This treebank consists of 100 sentences taken from a large contemporary written text corpus. These sentences were annotated manually according to the Universal Dependencies framework. In this paper, apart from elaborating on the approach that has been followed to create the treebank, we have also discussed some interesting syntactic constructions found in the corpus and how we have handled them using the current Universal Dependencies specification.
