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.

This paper presents the NDC Treebank of spoken Norwegian dialects in the Bokmål variety of Norwegian. It consists of dialect recordings made between 2006 and 2012 which have been digitised, segmented, transcribed and subsequently annotated with morphological and syntactic analysis. The nature of the spoken data gives rise to various challenges both in segmentation and annotation. We follow earlier efforts for Norwegian, in particular the LIA Treebank of spoken dialects transcribed in the Nynorsk variety of Norwegian, in the annotation principles to ensure interusability of the resources. We have developed a spoken language parser on the basis of the annotated material and report on its accuracy both on a test set across the dialects and by holding out single dialects.