Enhanced Universal Dependencies in the Wild: Evaluating Portuguese EUD Parsing in Realistic Scenarios

Elvis A. de Souza, Thiago A. S. Pardo


Abstract
Enhanced Universal Dependencies (EUD) provide a more informative syntactic representation than Basic Universal Dependencies by relaxing tree constraints to allow for graph structures. While conversion rules from basic to enhanced relations have been established for Portuguese, they were previously evaluated only on journalistic text using gold-standard basic syntactic trees. This paper evaluates the robustness of these rules in diverse scenarios ("in the wild"), encompassing other text genres and domains, as well as realistic parsing pipelines that rely on automatically generated basic syntax. Our results demonstrate that Portuguese-specific rules consistently outperform universal rules. However, the reliance on automatic basic syntax significantly impacts performance. This degradation is particularly severe when the domain of the input text differs from the training data of the basic parser. We also provide a detailed error analysis, identifying specific difficult linguistic phenomena and scenarios.
Anthology ID:
2026.propor-1.32
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1
Month:
April
Year:
2026
Address:
Salvador, Brazil
Editors:
Marlo Souza, Iria de-Dios-Flores, Diana Santos, Larissa Freitas, Jackson Wilke da Cruz Souza, Eugénio Ribeiro
Venue:
PROPOR
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
321–330
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-dnd/2026.propor-1.32/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Elvis A. de Souza and Thiago A. S. Pardo. 2026. Enhanced Universal Dependencies in the Wild: Evaluating Portuguese EUD Parsing in Realistic Scenarios. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1, pages 321–330, Salvador, Brazil. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Enhanced Universal Dependencies in the Wild: Evaluating Portuguese EUD Parsing in Realistic Scenarios (Souza & Pardo, PROPOR 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-dnd/2026.propor-1.32.pdf