CoBra: A Compound Branching Resource for Nominal Triconstituent Compounds in English and German

Carmen Schacht, Isabell Landwehr, Diana Davidson, Konrad Grabowski, Magdalena Meiser, Sophia Wiedmann


Abstract
We present CoBra, a resource containing triconstituent nominal compounds in English and German. This addresses an understudied aspect of compound processing, since research and resources in psycholinguistics and NLP have mostly focused on two-constituent compounds. In addition, our resource covers both general and scientific language, allowing for a register-informed perspective on compounds. It provides syntactic and semantic annotation of compound structure, in particular of the branching direction (i.e. the internal embedding structure, the Compound Branching) and the semantic relationship between constituents. Annotations are implemented using extensions of Universal Dependencies (UD) labels. To explore applications of our new resource, we also conduct a pilot study investigating the relationship between semantic transparency and branching direction. Our results indicate that there is indeed a correlation. Overall, our resource contributes to gaining a more detailed understanding of the structure and processing of morphologically complex words within the UD framework.
Anthology ID:
2026.udw-1.11
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2026)
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Çağrı Çöltekin, Kaja Dobrovoljc
Venues:
UDW | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
128–141
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-udw-11
DOI:
10.63317/4hbr9zq3ty8c
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Carmen Schacht, Isabell Landwehr, Diana Davidson, Konrad Grabowski, Magdalena Meiser, and Sophia Wiedmann. 2026. CoBra: A Compound Branching Resource for Nominal Triconstituent Compounds in English and German. In Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2026), pages 128–141, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
CoBra: A Compound Branching Resource for Nominal Triconstituent Compounds in English and German (Schacht et al., UDW 2026)
Copy Citation: