Enhanced English Universal Dependencies: An Improved Representation for Natural Language Understanding Tasks

Sebastian Schuster, Christopher D. Manning

Abstract
Many shallow natural language understanding tasks use dependency trees to extract relations between content words. However, strict surface-structure dependency trees tend to follow the linguistic structure of sentences too closely and frequently fail to provide direct relations between content words. To mitigate this problem, the original Stanford Dependencies representation also defines two dependency graph representations which contain additional and augmented relations that explicitly capture otherwise implicit relations between content words. In this paper, we revisit and extend these dependency graph representations in light of the recent Universal Dependencies (UD) initiative and provide a detailed account of an enhanced and an enhanced++ English UD representation. We further present a converter from constituency to basic, i.e., strict surface structure, UD trees, and a converter from basic UD trees to enhanced and enhanced++ English UD graphs. We release both converters as part of Stanford CoreNLP and the Stanford Parser.
Anthology ID:
L16-1376
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2371–2378
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1376
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Sebastian Schuster and Christopher D. Manning. 2016. Enhanced English Universal Dependencies: An Improved Representation for Natural Language Understanding Tasks. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 2371–2378, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Enhanced English Universal Dependencies: An Improved Representation for Natural Language Understanding Tasks (Schuster & Manning, LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/L16-1376.pdf
Data
Penn Treebank, Universal Dependencies
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