Is the framework of Universal Dependencies (UD) compatible with findings from linguistic typology about constructions in the world’s languages? To address this question, we need to systematically review how UD represents these constructions, and how it handles the range of morphosyntactic variation attested across languages. In this paper, we present the results of such a review focusing on speech act constructions. We find that UD currently lack mechanisms for systematically capturing speech act constructions and briefly discuss ways in which this can be remedied.

To assess whether the framework of Universal Dependencies (UD) is compatible with findings from linguistic typology, we need to systematically review how UD represents linguistic constructions and how it handles the range of morphosyntactic variation attested across languages. In this paper, we present the results of such a review focusing on complex predicates. We arrive at distinct findings regarding the two main types of complex predicates. The UD framework can well accommodate eventive complex predicates, particularly serial verbs, and more grammaticalized forms of complex predicates, such as voice and TAMP auxiliaries, with the exception of incorporating strategies. However, the guidelines for stative complex predicates could be revised based on the typology of morphosyntactic strategies. We briefly discuss possible ways in which UD can be extended to better capture these strategies.

To assess whether the framework of Universal Dependencies (UD) is compatible with findings from linguistic typology, we need to systematically review how UD represents linguistic constructions and how it handles the range of morphosyntactic variation attested across languages. In this paper, we present such a review focusing on nonprototypical predication and nonpredicational clauses. We find that, while nonprototypical predication is generally handled well in the UD framework, nonpredicational clauses are not discussed as such in the guidelines and often have to be annotated in a way that does not reflect their special information packaging functions. We briefly discuss ways in which the UD framework could be extended in order to better capture these functions.

This paper presents a multimodal semantic analysis of accessible Brazilian short films using a frame-based annotation approach. We introduce a subset of the Audition dataset, comprising six short films from the animation and documentary genres. We analysed three communicative modes: original audio, audio description, and visual content. Trained annotators semantically annotated each mode following the FrameNet Brazil multimodal methodology. To compare meaning across modalities, we used cosine similarity over frame-semantic representations. Results show that audio description aligns more closely with video content than original audio, reflecting its role in translating visual meaning into language. Our findings demonstrate the effectiveness of frame semantics in modelling meaning across modalities and provide quantitative evidence of audio description as a bridge between visual and verbal communication. The dataset and annotation strategies are a valuable resource for research on multimodal representation, semantic similarity, and accessible media.

Large Language Models are transforming NLP for a lot of tasks. However, how LLMs perform NLP tasks for LRLs is less explored. In alliance with the theme track of the NAACL’24, we focus on 12 low-resource languages (LRLs) from Brazil, 2 LRLs from Africa and 2 high-resource languages (HRLs) (e.g., English and Brazilian Portuguese). Our results indicate that the LLMs perform worse for the labeling of LRLs in comparison to HRLs in general. We explain the reasons behind this failure and provide an error analyses through examples from 2 Brazilian LRLs.