Nurit Melnik


2024

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UCxn: Typologically Informed Annotation of Constructions Atop Universal Dependencies
Leonie Weissweiler | Nina Böbel | Kirian Guiller | Santiago Herrera | Wesley Scivetti | Arthur Lorenzi | Nurit Melnik | Archna Bhatia | Hinrich Schütze | Lori Levin | Amir Zeldes | Joakim Nivre | William Croft | Nathan Schneider
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)

The Universal Dependencies (UD) project has created an invaluable collection of treebanks with contributions in over 140 languages. However, the UD annotations do not tell the full story. Grammatical constructions that convey meaning through a particular combination of several morphosyntactic elements—for example, interrogative sentences with special markers and/or word orders—are not labeled holistically. We argue for (i) augmenting UD annotations with a ‘UCxn’ annotation layer for such meaning-bearing grammatical constructions, and (ii) approaching this in a typologically informed way so that morphosyntactic strategies can be compared across languages. As a case study, we consider five construction families in ten languages, identifying instances of each construction in UD treebanks through the use of morphosyntactic patterns. In addition to findings regarding these particular constructions, our study yields important insights on methodology for describing and identifying constructions in language-general and language-particular ways, and lays the foundation for future constructional enrichment of UD treebanks.

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UniDive: A COST Action on Universality, Diversity and Idiosyncrasy in Language Technology
Agata Savary | Daniel Zeman | Verginica Barbu Mititelu | Anabela Barreiro | Olesea Caftanatov | Marie-Catherine de Marneffe | Kaja Dobrovoljc | Gülşen Eryiğit | Voula Giouli | Bruno Guillaume | Stella Markantonatou | Nurit Melnik | Joakim Nivre | Atul Kr. Ojha | Carlos Ramisch | Abigail Walsh | Beata Wójtowicz | Alina Wróblewska
Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Under-resourced Languages @ LREC-COLING 2024

This paper presents the objectives, organization and activities of the UniDive COST Action, a scientific network dedicated to universality, diversity and idiosyncrasy in language technology. We describe the objectives and organization of this initiative, the people involved, the working groups and the ongoing tasks and activities. This paper is also an pen call for participation towards new members and countries.