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Universal dependencies (UD) is a framework for morphosyntactic annotation of human language, which to date has been used to create treebanks for more than 100 languages. In this article, we outline the linguistic theory of the UD framework, which draws on a long tradition of typologically oriented grammatical theories. Grammatical relations between words are centrally used to explain how predicate–argument structures are encoded morphosyntactically in different languages while morphological features and part-of-speech classes give the properties of words. We argue that this theory is a good basis for cross-linguistically consistent annotation of typologically diverse languages in a way that supports computational natural language understanding as well as broader linguistic studies.

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This paper is concerned with the data structures, properties of query languages and visualization facilities required for the generic representation of richly annotated, heterogeneous linguistic corpora. We propose that above and beyond a general graph based data-model, which is becoming increasingly popular in many complex annotation formats, a well-defined concept of multiple, potentially conflicting segmentation layers must be introduced to deal with different sources and applications of corpus data flexibly. We also propose a generic solution for specialized corpus visualizations in a Web interface using annotation-triggered style sheets, which leverage the power of modern browsers and CSS for multiple and highly customizable views of primary data. We offer an implementation and evaluation of our architecture in ANNIS3, an open source browser-based architecture for corpus search and visualization. We present three case studies to test the coverage of the system, encompassing core linguistic and digital humanities use-cases including richly annotated newspaper treebanks, multilingual diplomatic and normalized manuscript materials edited in TEI, and analysis of multimodal recordings of spoken language.

This paper presents rstWeb, a new browserbased interface for Rhetorical Structure Theory and other discourse relation annotations. Expanding on previous tools for RST, rstWeb allows annotators to work online using only a browser. Project administrators can easily collect multiple annotations of the same documents on a central server, keep track of annotation processes and assign tasks and annotation schemes to users. A local version using an embedded web framework is also available, running offline on a desktop browser under the localhost.

This paper approaches the challenge of adapting coreference resolution to different coreference phenomena and mention-border definitions when there is no access to large training data in the desired target scheme. We take a configurable, rule-based approach centered on dependency syntax input, which we test by examining coreference types not covered in benchmark corpora such as OntoNotes. These include cataphora, compound modifier coreference, generic anaphors, predicate markables, i-within-i, and metonymy. We test our system, called xrenner, using different configurations on two very different datasets: Wall Street Journal material from OntoNotes and four types Wiki data from the GUM corpus. Our system compares favorably with two leading rule based and stochastic approaches in handling the different annotation formats.

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This paper presents a new system for openended discourse relation signal annotation in the framework of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), implemented on top of an online tool for RST annotation. We discuss existing projects annotating textual signals of discourse relations, which have so far not allowed simultaneously structuring and annotating words signaling hierarchical discourse trees, and demonstrate the design and applications of our interface by extending existing RST annotations in the freely available GUM corpus. * We would like to thank Richard Eckhart de Castilho, Debopam Das, Nathan Schneider and Maite Taboada, as well as three anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper and the system it describes.