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
Abstract
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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{weissweiler-etal-2024-ucxn,
title = "{UC}xn: Typologically Informed Annotation of Constructions Atop {U}niversal {D}ependencies",
author = {Weissweiler, Leonie and
B{\"o}bel, Nina and
Guiller, Kirian and
Herrera, Santiago and
Scivetti, Wesley and
Lorenzi, Arthur and
Melnik, Nurit and
Bhatia, Archna and
Sch{\"u}tze, Hinrich and
Levin, Lori and
Zeldes, Amir and
Nivre, Joakim and
Croft, William and
Schneider, Nathan},
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Kan, Min-Yen and
Hoste, Veronique and
Lenci, Alessandro and
Sakti, Sakriani and
Xue, Nianwen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
month = may,
year = "2024",
address = "Torino, Italia",
publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1471/",
pages = "16919--16932"
}