UCxn: Typologically-Informed Annotation of Constructions Atop Universal Dependencies

Leonie Weissweiler, Nina Böbel, Kirian Guiller, Santiago Herrera, Wesley Samuel Scivetti, Arthur Lorenzi, Nurit Melnik, Archna Bhatia, Hinrich Schütze, Lori Levin, Amir Zeldes, Joakim Nivre, William Croft, Nathan Schneider


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.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1471
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
16919–16932
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1471
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Leonie Weissweiler, Nina Böbel, Kirian Guiller, Santiago Herrera, Wesley Samuel Scivetti, Arthur Lorenzi, Nurit Melnik, Archna Bhatia, Hinrich Schütze, Lori Levin, Amir Zeldes, Joakim Nivre, William Croft, and Nathan Schneider. 2024. UCxn: Typologically-Informed Annotation of Constructions Atop Universal Dependencies. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 16919–16932, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
UCxn: Typologically-Informed Annotation of Constructions Atop Universal Dependencies (Weissweiler et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1471.pdf