Numeral systems across the world’s languages vary in fascinating ways, both regarding their synchronic structure and the diachronic processes that determined how they evolved in their current shape. For a proper comparison of numeral systems across different languages, however, it is important to code them in a standardized form that allows for the comparison of basic properties. Here, we present a simple but effective coding scheme for numeral annotation, along with a workflow that helps to code numeral systems in a computer-assisted manner, providing sample data for numerals from 1 to 40 in 25 typologically diverse languages. We perform a thorough analysis of the sample, focusing on the systematic comparison between the underlying and the surface morphological structure. We further experiment with automated models for morpheme segmentation, where we find allomorphy as the major reason for segmentation errors. Finally, we show that subword tokenization algorithms are not viable for discovering morphemes in low-resource scenarios.

The paper proposes a novel data representation inspired by Universal Dependencies (UD) syntactic trees, which are extended to capture the internal morphological structure of word forms. As a result, morphological segmentation is incorporated within the UD representation of syntactic dependencies. To derive the proposed data structure we leverage existing annotation of UD treebanks as well as available resources for segmentation, and we select 10 languages to work with in the presented case study. Additionally, statistical analysis reveals a robust correlation between morphs and sets of morphological features of words. We thus align the morphs to the observed feature inventories capturing the morphological meaning of morphs. Through the beneficial exploitation of cross-lingual correspondence of morphs, the proposed syntactic representation based on morphological segmentation proves to enhance the comparability of sentence structures across languages.

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.