Comparative Concepts or Descriptive Categories: a UD Case study

Matthieu Pierre Boyer, Mathieu Dehouck


Abstract
In this paper, we present a series of methods used to quantify the soundness of using the same names to annotate cases in different languages. We follow the idea described by Martin Haspelmath that descriptive categories and comparative concepts are different objects and we look at the necessary simplification taken by the Universal Dependencies project. We thus compare cases in closely related languages as belonging to commensurable descriptive categories. Then we look at the corresponding underlying comparative concepts. We finally looked at the possibility of assigning cases to adpositions.
Anthology ID:
2025.nodalida-1.7
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025)
Month:
march
Year:
2025
Address:
Tallinn, Estonia
Editors:
Richard Johansson, Sara Stymne
Venue:
NoDaLiDa
SIG:
Publisher:
University of Tartu Library
Note:
Pages:
55–65
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.nodalida-1.7/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Matthieu Pierre Boyer and Mathieu Dehouck. 2025. Comparative Concepts or Descriptive Categories: a UD Case study. In Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025), pages 55–65, Tallinn, Estonia. University of Tartu Library.
Cite (Informal):
Comparative Concepts or Descriptive Categories: a UD Case study (Boyer & Dehouck, NoDaLiDa 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.nodalida-1.7.pdf