Cross-Dataset Inconsistencies in Morphological Annotation: Evidence from Universal Dependencies

Vlasta Ohlídalová


Abstract
Ensuring annotation consistency is a challenging task in language dataset development. While difficulty is typically increasing at higher levels of linguistic complexity, we show that it is a critical issue even for fundamental linguistic tasks such as morphological annotation. Contrary to previous research that targeted intra-dataset inconsistencies, this study investigates inconsistencies across various pre-existing datasets for the same language. On the example of Universal Dependencies datasets, we examined what morphological categories exhibit the most disagreement. The analysis revealed that there are specific categories with low inconsistency score that indicates good agreement on these features (namely Case, Gender, Number and to a lesser extent Animacy). On the other hand, the Part-of-Speech (UPOS) tag stands out as a “red flag” due to high inconsistency score. Analysis of the most frequent inconsistencies suggest that they are dataset-specific artifacts rather than inherently language-specific phenomena.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.917
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
11715–11723
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.917/
DOI:
10.63317/55hiti2bjus3
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vlasta Ohlídalová. 2026. Cross-Dataset Inconsistencies in Morphological Annotation: Evidence from Universal Dependencies. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 11715–11723, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
Cross-Dataset Inconsistencies in Morphological Annotation: Evidence from Universal Dependencies (Ohlídalová, LREC 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.917.pdf
External:
 https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-917