This paper presents the objectives, organization and activities of the UniDive COST Action, a scientific network dedicated to universality, diversity and idiosyncrasy in language technology. We describe the objectives and organization of this initiative, the people involved, the working groups and the ongoing tasks and activities. This paper is also an pen call for participation towards new members and countries.

We present ongoing work towards defining a lexicon-corpus interface to serve as a benchmark in the representation of multiword expressions (of various parts of speech) in dedicated lexica and the linking of these entries to their corpus occurrences. The final aim is the harnessing of such resources for the automatic identification of multiword expressions in a text. The involvement of several natural languages aims at the universality of a solution not centered on a particular language, and also accommodating idiosyncrasies. Challenges in the lexicographic description of multiword expressions are discussed, the current status of lexica dedicated to this linguistic phenomenon is outlined, as well as the solution we envisage for creating an ecosystem of interlinked lexica and corpora containing and, respectively, annotated with multiword expressions.

We conduct a morphosyntactic investigation into the light verb constructions (LVCs) or the verbo-nominal predicates in South Asian languages. This work spans the Indo-Aryan and Dravidian language families in treebanks based on Universal Dependencies (UD). For the selected languages we show how well the existing annotation guidelines fare for the LVCs. We also reiterate the importance of the core and oblique distinction in UD and how informative it is for making accurate morphosyntactic annotation judgments for such predicates.

This paper analyzes multiple deep-syntactic frameworks with the goal of creating a proposal for a set of universal semantic role labels. The proposal examines various theoretic linguistic perspectives and focuses on Meaning-Text Theory and Functional Generative Description frameworks and PropBank. The research is based on the data from four Indo-European and one Uralic language – Spanish and Catalan (Taulé et al., 2011), Czech (Hajič et al., 2017), English (Hajič et al., 2012), and Finnish (Haverinen et al., 2015). Updated datasets with the new universal semantic role labels are now publicly available as a result of our work. Nevertheless, our proposal is oriented towards Universal Dependencies (UD) (de Marneffe et al., 2021) and our ultimate goal is to apply a subset of the universal labels to the full UD data.

The aim of the Universal Anaphora initiative is to push forward the state of the art in anaphora and anaphora resolution by expanding the aspects of anaphoric interpretation which are or can be reliably annotated in anaphoric corpora, producing unified standards to annotate and encode these annotations, delivering datasets encoded according to these standards, and developing methods for evaluating models that carry out this type of interpretation. Although several papers on aspects of the initiative have appeared, no overall description of the initiative’s goals, proposals and achievements has been published yet except as an online draft. This paper aims to fill this gap, as well as to discuss its progress so far.

This article presents a comparative analysis of four different syntactic typological approaches applied to 20 different languages to determine the most effective one to be used for the improvement of dependency parsing results via corpora combination. We evaluated these strategies by calculating the correlation between the language distances and the empirical LAS results obtained when languages were combined in pairs. From the results, it was possible to observe that the best method is based on the extraction of word order patterns which happen inside subtrees of the syntactic structure of the sentences.

This paper presents the harmonisation process carried out on the five treebanks available for Latin in Universal Dependencies, with the aim of eliminating the discrepancies in their annotation styles. Indeed, this is the first issue to be addressed when parsing Latin, as significant drops in parsing accuracy on different Latin treebanks have been repeatedly observed. Latin syntactic variability surely accounts for this, but parsing results are as well affected by divergent annotation choices. By analysing where annotations differ, we propose a Python-based alignment of the five UD treebanks. Consequently, the impact of annotation choices on accuracy scores is assessed by performing parsing experiments with UDPipe and Stanza.

This article presents a comparative analysis of four different syntactic typological approaches applied to 20 different languages. We compared three specific quantitative methods, using parallel CoNLL-U corpora, to the classification obtained via syntactic features provided by a typological database (lang2vec). First, we analyzed the Marsagram linear approach which consists of extracting the frequency word-order patterns regarding the position of components inside syntactic nodes. The second approach considers the relative position of heads and dependents, and the third is based simply on the relative position of verbs and objects. From the results, it was possible to observe that each method provides different language clusters which can be compared to the classic genealogical classification (the lang2vec and the head and dependent methods being the closest). As different word-order phenomena are considered in these specific typological strategies, each one provides a different angle of analysis to be applied according to the precise needs of the researchers.

This paper focuses on the process of harmonising the five Latin treebanks available in Universal Dependencies with respect to morphological annotation. We propose a workflow that allows to first spot inconsistencies and missing information, in order to detect to what extent the annotations differ, and then correct the retrieved bugs, with the goal of equalising the annotation of morphological features in the treebanks and producing more consistent linguistic data. Subsequently, we present some experiments carried out with UDPipe and Stanza in order to assess the impact of such harmonisation on parsing accuracy.

This paper summarizes the second edition of the shared task on multilingual coreference resolution, held with the CRAC 2023 workshop. Just like last year, participants of the shared task were to create trainable systems that detect mentions and group them based on identity coreference; however, this year’s edition uses a slightly different primary evaluation score, and is also broader in terms of covered languages: version 1.1 of the multilingual collection of harmonized coreference resources CorefUD was used as the source of training and evaluation data this time, with 17 datasets for 12 languages. 7 systems competed in this shared task.

This paper presents an overview of the shared task on multilingual coreference resolution associated with the CRAC 2022 workshop. Shared task participants were supposed to develop trainable systems capable of identifying mentions and clustering them according to identity coreference. The public edition of CorefUD 1.0, which contains 13 datasets for 10 languages, was used as the source of training and evaluation data. The CoNLL score used in previous coreference-oriented shared tasks was used as the main evaluation metric. There were 8 coreference prediction systems submitted by 5 participating teams; in addition, there was a competitive Transformer-based baseline system provided by the organizers at the beginning of the shared task. The winner system outperformed the baseline by 12 percentage points (in terms of the CoNLL scores averaged across all datasets for individual languages).

Recent advances in standardization for annotated language resources have led to successful large scale efforts, such as the Universal Dependencies (UD) project for multilingual syntactically annotated data. By comparison, the important task of coreference resolution, which clusters multiple mentions of entities in a text, has yet to be standardized in terms of data formats or annotation guidelines. In this paper we present CorefUD, a multilingual collection of corpora and a standardized format for coreference resolution, compatible with morphosyntactic annotations in the UD framework and including facilities for related tasks such as named entity recognition, which forms a first step in the direction of convergence for coreference resolution across languages.

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 crosslinguistically consistent annotation of typologically diverse languages in a way that supports computational natural language understanding as well as broader linguistic studies.

One can find dozens of data resources for various languages in which coreference - a relation between two or more expressions that refer to the same real-world entity - is manually annotated. One could also assume that such expressions usually constitute syntactically meaningful units; however, mention spans have been annotated simply by delimiting token intervals in most coreference projects, i.e., independently of any syntactic representation. We argue that it could be advantageous to make syntactic and coreference annotations convergent in the long term. We present a pilot empirical study focused on matches and mismatches between hand-annotated linear mention spans and automatically parsed syntactic trees that follow Universal Dependencies conventions. The study covers 9 datasets for 8 different languages.

We describe the second IWPT task on end-to-end parsing from raw text to Enhanced Universal Dependencies. We provide details about the evaluation metrics and the datasets used for training and evaluation. We compare the approaches taken by participating teams and discuss the results of the shared task, also in comparison with the first edition of this task.

We present our submission to the SIGTYP 2020 Shared Task on the prediction of typological features. We submit a constrained system, predicting typological features only based on the WALS database. We investigate two approaches. The simpler of the two is a system based on estimating correlation of feature values within languages by computing conditional probabilities and mutual information. The second approach is to train a neural predictor operating on precomputed language embeddings based on WALS features. Our submitted system combines the two approaches based on their self-estimated confidence scores. We reach the accuracy of 70.7% on the test data and rank first in the shared task.

This paper presents the first dependency treebank for Bhojpuri, a resource-poor language that belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family. The objective behind the Bhojpuri Treebank (BHTB) project is to create a substantial, syntactically annotated treebank which not only acts as a valuable resource in building language technological tools, also helps in cross-lingual learning and typological research. Currently, the treebank consists of 4,881 annotated tokens in accordance with the annotation scheme of Universal Dependencies (UD). A Bhojpuri tagger and parser were created using machine learning approach. The accuracy of the model is 57.49% UAS, 45.50% LAS, 79.69% UPOS accuracy and 77.64% XPOS accuracy. The paper describes the details of the project including a discussion on linguistic analysis and annotation process of the Bhojpuri UD treebank.

Universal Dependencies is an open community effort to create cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages within a dependency-based lexicalist framework. The annotation consists in a linguistically motivated word segmentation; a morphological layer comprising lemmas, universal part-of-speech tags, and standardized morphological features; and a syntactic layer focusing on syntactic relations between predicates, arguments and modifiers. In this paper, we describe version 2 of the universal guidelines (UD v2), discuss the major changes from UD v1 to UD v2, and give an overview of the currently available treebanks for 90 languages.

Low-resource languages present enormous NLP opportunities as well as varying degrees of difficulties. The newly released treebank of hand-annotated parts of the Yoruba Bible provides an avenue for dependency analysis of the Yoruba language; the application of a new grammar formalism to the language. In this paper, we discuss our choice of Universal Dependencies, important dependency annotation decisions considered in the creation of the first annotation guidelines for Yoruba and results of our parsing experiments. We also lay the foundation for future incorporation of other domains with the initial test on Yoruba Wikipedia articles and highlighted future directions for the rapid expansion of the treebank.

This article gives an overview of how sentence meaning is represented in eleven deep-syntactic frameworks, ranging from those based on linguistic theories elaborated for decades to rather lightweight NLP-motivated approaches. We outline the most important characteristics of each framework and then discuss how particular language phenomena are treated across those frameworks, while trying to shed light on commonalities as well as differences.

This overview introduces the task of parsing into enhanced universal dependencies, describes the datasets used for training and evaluation, and evaluation metrics. We outline various approaches and discuss the results of the shared task.

In this paper, we introduce the first Universal Dependencies (UD) treebank for standard Albanian, consisting of 60 sentences collected from the Albanian Wikipedia, annotated with lemmas, universal part-of-speech tags, morphological features and syntactic dependencies. In addition to presenting the treebank itself, we discuss a selection of linguistic constructions in Albanian whose analysis in UD is not self-evident, including core arguments and the status of indirect objects, pronominal clitics, genitive constructions, prearticulated adjectives, and modal verbs.

The 2020 Shared Task at the Conference for Computational Language Learning (CoNLL) was devoted to Meaning Representation Parsing (MRP) across frameworks and languages. Extending a similar setup from the previous year, five distinct approaches to the representation of sentence meaning in the form of directed graphs were represented in the English training and evaluation data for the task, packaged in a uniform graph abstraction and serialization; for four of these representation frameworks, additional training and evaluation data was provided for one additional language per framework. The task received submissions from eight teams, of which two do not participate in the official ranking because they arrived after the closing deadline or made use of additional training data. All technical information regarding the task, including system submissions, official results, and links to supporting resources and software are available from the task web site at: http://mrp.nlpl.eu

Prague Tectogrammatical Graphs (PTG) is a meaning representation framework that originates in the tectogrammatical layer of the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT) and is theoretically founded in Functional Generative Description of language (FGD). PTG in its present form has been prepared for the CoNLL 2020 shared task on Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing (MRP). It is generated automatically from the Prague treebanks and stored in the JSON-based MRP graph interchange format. The conversion is partially lossy; in this paper we describe what part of annotation was included and how it is represented in PTG.

This paper describes the ÚFAL--Oslo system submission to the shared task on Cross-Framework Meaning Representation Parsing (MRP, Oepen et al. 2019). The submission is based on several third-party parsers. Within the official shared task results, the submission ranked 11th out of 13 participating systems.

This paper presents the submission by the Charles University-University of Malta team to the SIGMORPHON 2019 Shared Task on Morphological Analysis and Lemmatization in context. We present a lemmatization model based on previous work on neural transducers (Makarov and Clematide, 2018b; Aharoni and Goldberg, 2016). The key difference is that our model transforms the whole word form in every step, instead of consuming it character by character. We propose a merging strategy inspired by Byte-Pair-Encoding that reduces the space of valid operations by merging frequent adjacent operations. The resulting operations not only encode the actions to be performed but the relative position in the word token and how characters need to be transformed. Our morphological tagger is a vanilla biLSTM tagger that operates over operation representations, encoding operations and words in a hierarchical manner. Even though relative performance according to metrics is below the baseline, experiments show that our models capture important associations between interpretable operation labels and fine-grained morpho-syntax labels.

We present a fairly complete morphological analyzer for Shipibo-Konibo, a low-resourced native language spoken in the Amazonian region of Peru. We resort to the robustness of finite-state systems in order to model the complex morphosyntax of the language. Evaluation over raw corpora shows promising coverage of grammatical phenomena, limited only by the scarce lexicon. We make this tool freely available so as to aid the production of annotated corpora and impulse further research in native languages of Peru.

This paper describes the changes applied to the original process used to convert the Index Thomisticus Treebank, a corpus including texts in Medieval Latin by Thomas Aquinas, into the annotation style of Universal Dependencies. The changes are made both to harmonise the Universal Dependencies version of the Index Thomisticus Treebank with the two other available Latin treebanks and to fix errors and inconsistencies resulting from the original process. The paper details the treatment of different issues in PoS tagging, lemmatisation and assignment of dependency relations. Finally, it assesses the quality of the new conversion process by providing an evaluation against a gold standard.

In this paper, we focus on parsing rare and non-trivial constructions, in particular ellipsis. We report on several experiments in enrichment of training data for this specific construction, evaluated on five languages: Czech, English, Finnish, Russian and Slovak. These data enrichment methods draw upon self-training and tri-training, combined with a stratified sampling method mimicking the structural complexity of the original treebank. In addition, using these same methods, we also demonstrate small improvements over the CoNLL-17 parsing shared task winning system for four of the five languages, not only restricted to the elliptical constructions.

Every year, the Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) features a shared task, in which participants train and test their learning systems on the same data sets. In 2018, one of two tasks was devoted to learning dependency parsers for a large number of languages, in a real-world setting without any gold-standard annotation on test input. All test sets followed a unified annotation scheme, namely that of Universal Dependencies. This shared task constitutes a 2nd edition—the first one took place in 2017 (Zeman et al., 2017); the main metric from 2017 has been kept, allowing for easy comparison, also in 2018, and two new main metrics have been used. New datasets added to the Universal Dependencies collection between mid-2017 and the spring of 2018 have contributed to increased difficulty of the task this year. In this overview paper, we define the task and the updated evaluation methodology, describe data preparation, report and analyze the main results, and provide a brief categorization of the different approaches of the participating systems.

The Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL) features a shared task, in which participants train and test their learning systems on the same data sets. In 2017, the task was devoted to learning dependency parsers for a large number of languages, in a real-world setting without any gold-standard annotation on input. All test sets followed a unified annotation scheme, namely that of Universal Dependencies. In this paper, we define the task and evaluation methodology, describe how the data sets were prepared, report and analyze the main results, and provide a brief categorization of the different approaches of the participating systems.

Universal Dependencies (UD) is a project that seeks to develop cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages. This tutorial gives an introduction to the UD framework and resources, from basic design principles to annotation guidelines and existing treebanks. We also discuss tools for developing and exploiting UD treebanks and survey applications of UD in NLP and linguistics.

We once had a corp, or should we say, it once had us They showed us its tags, isn’t it great, unified tags They asked us to parse and they told us to use everything So we looked around and we noticed there was near nothing We took other langs, bitext aligned: words one-to-one We played for two weeks, and then they said, here is the test The parser kept training till morning, just until deadline So we had to wait and hope what we get would be just fine And, when we awoke, the results were done, we saw we’d won So, we wrote this paper, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood.

We describe the process of creating NUDAR, a Universal Dependency treebank for Arabic. We present the conversion from the Penn Arabic Treebank to the Universal Dependency syntactic representation through an intermediate dependency representation. We discuss the challenges faced in the conversion of the trees, the decisions we made to solve them, and the validation of our conversion. We also present initial parsing results on NUDAR.

Part-of-speech (POS) induction is one of the most popular tasks in research on unsupervised NLP. Various unsupervised and semi-supervised methods have been proposed to tag an unseen language. However, many of them require some partial understanding of the target language because they rely on dictionaries or parallel corpora such as the Bible. In this paper, we propose a different method named delexicalized tagging, for which we only need a raw corpus of the target language. We transfer tagging models trained on annotated corpora of one or more resource-rich languages. We employ language-independent features such as word length, frequency, neighborhood entropy, character classes (alphabetic vs. numeric vs. punctuation) etc. We demonstrate that such features can, to certain extent, serve as predictors of the part of speech, represented by the universal POS tag.

Cross-linguistically consistent annotation is necessary for sound comparative evaluation and cross-lingual learning experiments. It is also useful for multilingual system development and comparative linguistic studies. Universal Dependencies is an open community effort to create cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages within a dependency-based lexicalist framework. In this paper, we describe v1 of the universal guidelines, the underlying design principles, and the currently available treebanks for 33 languages.

We announce a new language resource for research on semantic parsing, a large, carefully curated collection of semantic dependency graphs representing multiple linguistic traditions. This resource is called SDP~2016 and provides an update and extension to previous versions used as Semantic Dependency Parsing target representations in the 2014 and 2015 Semantic Evaluation Exercises. For a common core of English text, this third edition comprises semantic dependency graphs from four distinct frameworks, packaged in a unified abstract format and aligned at the sentence and token levels. SDP 2016 is the first general release of this resource and available for licensing from the Linguistic Data Consortium in May 2016. The data is accompanied by an open-source SDP utility toolkit and system results from previous contrastive parsing evaluations against these target representations.

We present HindEnCorp, a parallel corpus of Hindi and English, and HindMonoCorp, a monolingual corpus of Hindi in their release version 0.5. Both corpora were collected from web sources and preprocessed primarily for the training of statistical machine translation systems. HindEnCorp consists of 274k parallel sentences (3.9 million Hindi and 3.8 million English tokens). HindMonoCorp amounts to 787 million tokens in 44 million sentences. Both the corpora are freely available for non-commercial research and their preliminary release has been used by numerous participants of the WMT 2014 shared translation task.

We present HamleDT 2.0 (HArmonized Multi-LanguagE Dependency Treebank). HamleDT 2.0 is a collection of 30 existing treebanks harmonized into a common annotation style, the Prague Dependencies, and further transformed into Stanford Dependencies, a treebank annotation style that became popular in recent years. We use the newest basic Universal Stanford Dependencies, without added language-specific subtypes. We describe both of the annotation styles, including adjustments that were necessary to make, and provide details about the conversion process. We also discuss the differences between the two styles, evaluating their advantages and disadvantages, and note the effects of the differences on the conversion. We regard the stanfordization as generally successful, although we admit several shortcomings, especially in the distinction between direct and indirect objects, that have to be addressed in future. We release part of HamleDT 2.0 freely; we are not allowed to redistribute the whole dataset, but we do provide the conversion pipeline.

We present a complex, open source tool for detailed machine translation error analysis providing the user with automatic error detection and classification, several monolingual alignment algorithms as well as with training and test corpus browsing. The tool is the result of a merge of automatic error detection and classification of Hjerson (Popović, 2011) and Addicter (Zeman et al., 2011) into the pipeline and web visualization of Addicter. It classifies errors into categories similar to those of Vilar et al. (2006), such as: morphological, reordering, missing words, extra words and lexical errors. The graphical user interface shows alignments in both training corpus and test data; the different classes of errors are colored. Also, the summary of errors can be displayed to provide an overall view of the MT system's weaknesses. The tool was developed in Linux, but it was tested on Windows too.

We propose HamleDT ― HArmonized Multi-LanguagE Dependency Treebank. HamleDT is a compilation of existing dependency treebanks (or dependency conversions of other treebanks), transformed so that they all conform to the same annotation style. While the license terms prevent us from directly redistributing the corpora, most of them are easily acquirable for research purposes. What we provide instead is the software that normalizes tree structures in the data obtained by the user from their original providers.

Statistical machine translation to morphologically richer languages is a challenging task and more so if the source and target languages differ in word order. Current state-of-the-art MT systems thus deliver mediocre results. Adding more parallel data often helps improve the results; if it doesn't, it may be caused by various problems such as different domains, bad alignment or noise in the new data. In this paper we evaluate the English-to-Hindi MT task from this data perspective. We discuss several available parallel data sources and provide cross-evaluation results on their combinations using two freely available statistical MT systems. We demonstrate various problems encountered in the data and describe automatic methods of data cleaning and normalization. We also show that the contents of two independently distributed data sets can unexpectedly overlap, which negatively affects translation quality. Together with the error analysis, we also present a new tool for viewing aligned corpora, which makes it easier to detect difficult parts in the data even for a developer not speaking the target language.

Part-of-speech or morphological tags are important means of annotation in a vast number of corpora. However, different sets of tags are used in different corpora, even for the same language. Tagset conversion is difficult, and solutions tend to be tailored to a particular pair of tagsets. We propose a universal approach that makes the conversion tools reusable. We also provide an indirect evaluation in the context of a parsing task.