@inproceedings{cecchini-2025-quid,
    title = "Quid verbumst? Applying a definition of word to {L}atin in {U}niversal {D}ependencies",
    author = "Cecchini, Flavio Massimiliano",
    editor = {Bomma, Gosse  and
      {\c{C}}{\"o}ltekin, {\c{C}}a{\u{g}}r{\i}},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2025)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Ljubljana, Slovenia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.udw-1.19/",
    pages = "174--185",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-292-3",
    abstract = "Words, more specifically ``syntactic words'', are at the centre of a dependency-based approach like Universal Dependencies. Nonetheless, its guidelines do not make explicit how such a word should be defined and identified, and so it happens that different treebanks use different standards to this end. To counter this vagueness, the community has been recently discussing a definition put forward in (Haspelmath, 2023) which is not fully uncontroversial. This contribution is a preliminary case study that tries its hand at concretely applying this definition (except for compounds) to Latin in order to gain more insights about its operability and groundedness. This is helped by the spread of Latin over many treebanks, the presence of good linguistic resources to analyse it, and a linguistic type which is probably not fully considered in (Haspelmath, 2023). On the side, this work shows once more the difficulties of turning theoretical definitions into working directives in the realm of linguistic annotation."
}