Expletives in Universal Dependency Treebanks

Gosse Bouma, Jan Hajic, Dag Haug, Joakim Nivre, Per Erik Solberg, Lilja Øvrelid

Abstract
Although treebanks annotated according to the guidelines of Universal Dependencies (UD) now exist for many languages, the goal of annotating the same phenomena in a cross-linguistically consistent fashion is not always met. In this paper, we investigate one phenomenon where we believe such consistency is lacking, namely expletive elements. Such elements occupy a position that is structurally associated with a core argument (or sometimes an oblique dependent), yet are non-referential and semantically void. Many UD treebanks identify at least some elements as expletive, but the range of phenomena differs between treebanks, even for closely related languages, and sometimes even for different treebanks for the same language. In this paper, we present criteria for identifying expletives that are applicable across languages and compatible with the goals of UD, give an overview of expletives as found in current UD treebanks, and present recommendations for the annotation of expletives so that more consistent annotation can be achieved in future releases.
Anthology ID:
W18-6003
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018)
Month:
November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Teresa Lynn, Sebastian Schuster
Venue:
UDW
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18–26
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W18-6003
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W18-6003
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gosse Bouma, Jan Hajic, Dag Haug, Joakim Nivre, Per Erik Solberg, and Lilja Øvrelid. 2018. Expletives in Universal Dependency Treebanks. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018), pages 18–26, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Expletives in Universal Dependency Treebanks (Bouma et al., UDW 2018)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-dup-bibkey/W18-6003.pdf
Code
 gossebouma/expletives
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