Encoding Logical Relations of Chinese Complex Sentences within the Universal Dependencies Framework

Hongpu Zhu, Hongzhi Xu


Abstract
Clauses in complex sentences always entail certain logical relations such as conjunctive, causative, and concessive. Such logical relations, however, are not properly represented in the universal dependencies (UD) framework, being collapsed into a adverbial clause (advcl) or clausal complement (ccomp) relation between clausal heads. This study extends the UD framework by encoding 13 logical relations. With the new framework, which is structurally identical to UD, we construct a training corpus containing about 1,769 sentences extracted from Chinese newswire and annotated an existing Chinese corpus (GSD-simp test) in UD as a test set. We trained a BERT-based biaffine parser and fine-tuned the Qwen-3 model with the training corpus and evaluated the models on the UD test data. They are compared against four general purpose LLMs including GPT-4o, GPT-5, Claude 4 and DeepSeek V3.2. We find that the fine-tuned Qwen-3-8B model achieves a UAS/LAS of 0.840/0.757, higher than the BERT-based parser and the general purpose LLMs. The results confirm the feasibility of our framework and highlight the inherent challenges of parsing hierarchical and implicit inter-clause relations.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.910
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
11620–11630
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.910/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hongpu Zhu and Hongzhi Xu. 2026. Encoding Logical Relations of Chinese Complex Sentences within the Universal Dependencies Framework. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:11620–11630.
Cite (Informal):
Encoding Logical Relations of Chinese Complex Sentences within the Universal Dependencies Framework (Zhu & Xu, LREC 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.910.pdf