The status of function words in dependency grammar: A critique of Universal Dependencies (UD)

Osborne, Timothy; Gerdes, Kim

doi:10.5334/gjgl.537

Cited by 39 publications

(44 citation statements)

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“…The dependency representation based on the Universal Dependencies (UD 1 ), as shown in Figure 1 (a), is one of the most eminent models by now under the framework of dependency grammar. It attempts at establishing a multilingual morphosyntactic scheme to annotate various languages in a consistent manner Osborne and Gerdes, 2019). Thus, the UD annotation scheme holds a semantic over syntactic criteria to put priorities to content words to maximize "crosslinguistic parallelism" de Marneffe and Nivre, 2019).…”

Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It aims to make the annotation scheme close to the dependency traditions, like Meaning-Text-Theory (MTT) , Word Grammar (Hudson, 1984), etc. Hence, the SUD annotation scheme is a syntactic-oriented dependency representation that seeks to promote the syntactic motivations (Gerdes et al, 2018;Osborne and Gerdes, 2019). Therefore, the UD and SUD annotation schemes signify two typical preferences of dependency grammar, one is semantic-oriented, and the other is syntactic-oriented.…”

Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This means that language materials based on UD annotation scheme lead to the interpretation of larger MDDs. Theoretically, it is believed that annotation schemes that lead to shorter MDDs is more linguistically applicable (Osborne and Gerdes, 2019). Hence, the SUD annotation scheme seems to be more suitable for reflecting the human cognitive demand and the syntactic complexity of the language under processing.…”

Section: Annotation Scheme and Mean Dependency Distancementioning

confidence: 99%

“…the comp relation between along and lake in Figure 1 (b)) (Gerdes et al, 2018: 71 are also altered. This shows that the underlying reason for the distinction between UD and SUD annotation scheme is that the UD annotation scheme favours taking the content words as the head of function words while the SUD annotation scheme chooses the function words as heads over content words in dependency relations Gerdes et al, 2018;Osborne and Gerdes, 2019). To be specific, the UD treebanks first connect the content words and then the function words to emphasize the semantic similarities of all languages, while the SUD treebanks connect content words mediated by function words to complete the functional roles of function words.…”

Section: Annotation Scheme and Annotating Preferencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Many previous works have analyzed the syntactic and semantic treatment of the UD annotation scheme, cf. de Lhoneux and Nivre (2016), Wisniewski and Lacroix (2017), Osborne and Gerdes (2019). For example, UD tend to make the content word (NOUN) as the head of the function word (ADP), thus the common word order of placing a prepositional phrase after the noun it modifies would have longer DL than the opposite case, which is against the DLM hypothesis.…”

Section: Technical Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (Quasy, SyntaxFest 2019)

2019

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The use of corpora for NLP and linguistics has only increased in recent years. In NLP, machine learning systems are by nature data-intensive, and in linguistics there is a renewed interest in the empirical validation of linguistic theory, particularly through corpus evidence. While the first statistical parsers have long been trained on the Penn treebank phrase structures, dependency treebanks, whether natively annotated with dependencies, or converted from phrase structures, have become more and more popular, as evidenced by the success of the Universal Dependency project, currently uniting 120 treebanks in 80 languages, annotated in the same dependency-based scheme. The availability of these resources has boosted empirical quantitative studies in syntax. It has also lead to a growing interest in theoretical questions around syntactic dependency, its history, its foundations, and the analyses of various constructions in dependency-based frameworks. Furthermore, the availability of large, multilingual annotated data sets, such as those provided by the Universal Dependencies project, has made cross-linguistic analysis possible to an extent that could only be dreamt of only a few years ago. In this context it was natural to bring together TLT (Treebanks and Linguistic Theories), the historical conference on treebanks as linguistic resources, Depling (The international conference on Dependency Linguistics), the conference uniting research on models and theories around dependency representations, and UDW (Universal Dependency Workshop), the annual meeting of the UD project itself. Moreover, in order to create a point of contact with the large community working in quantitative linguistics it seemed expedient to create a workshop dedicated to quantitative syntactic measures on treebanks and raw corpora, which gave rise to Quasy, the first workshop on Quantitative Syntax. And this led us to the first SyntaxFest. Because the potential audience and submissions to the four events were likely to have substantial overlap, we decided to have a single reviewing process for the whole SyntaxFest. Authors could choose to submit their paper to one or several of the four events, and in case of acceptance, the program co-chairs would decide which event to assign the accepted paper to.

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Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Background and Motivationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Annotation Scheme and Mean Dependency Distancementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Annotation Scheme and Annotating Preferencementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Technical Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Proceedings of the First Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (Quasy, SyntaxFest 2019)

2019

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Metrics of Syntactic Equivalence to Assess Translation Difficulty

Vanroy

Clercq

Tezcan

et al. 2021

Explorations in Empirical Translation Process Research

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We propose three linguistically motivated metrics to quantify syntactic equivalence between a source sentence and its translation. Syntactically Aware Cross (SACr) measures the degree of word group reordering by creating syntactically motivated groups of words that are aligned. Secondly, an intuitive approach is to compare the linguistic labels of the word-aligned source and target tokens. Finally, on a deeper linguistic level, Aligned Syntactic Tree Edit Distance (ASTrED) compares the dependency structure of both sentences. To be able to compare source and target dependency labels we make use of Universal Dependencies (UD). We provide an analysis of our metrics by comparing them with translation process data in mixed models. Even though our examples and analysis focus on English as the source language and Dutch as the target language, the proposed metrics can be applied to any language for which UD models are attainable. An open-source implementation is made available.

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Universal Dependencies for Mandarin Chinese

Poiret

Wong

Lee

et al. 2021

Lang Resources & Evaluation

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This article presents a Universal Dependency (UD) annotation scheme for Mandarin Chinese, as well as the current UD Chinese HK treebank. Our focus is mainly on parts-of-speech (POS) tags and syntactic relations, with a quite large array of phenomena investigated. The main goal is to make transparent the linguistic consideration behind our annotation choices, and show how we articulated these choices with the criteria of Universal Dependencies. This scheme has been developed with reference to two other dependency schemes for this language, i.e. the Chinese Stanford Dependencies (Chang et al. 2009) and the Chinese Dependency Treebank (HIT-SCIR 2010). We provide mappings between our scheme and the two others. The content of the UD Chinese HK treebank is discussed in relation to the other UD treebanks for Chinese, and the interannotator agreement on POS and dependency annotation is reported. Our proposed scheme is motivated by reasoned linguistic analysis, is suitable for cross-linguistic comparison, and produced a high level of agreement between annotators.

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The status of function words in dependency grammar: A critique of Universal Dependencies (UD)

Cited by 39 publications

References 28 publications

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (Quasy, SyntaxFest 2019)

Proceedings of the First Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (Quasy, SyntaxFest 2019)

Metrics of Syntactic Equivalence to Assess Translation Difficulty

Universal Dependencies for Mandarin Chinese

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