UCxn: Typologically Informed Annotation of Constructions Atop Universal Dependencies
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.
Code (1)
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Finding Corresponding Constructions in English and Japanese in a TED Talk Parallel Corpus using Frames-and-Constructions Analysis
This paper reports on an effort to search for corresponding constructions in English and Japanese in a TED Talk parallel corpus, using frames-and-constructions analysis (Ohara, 2019; Ohara and Okubo, 2020; cf. Czulo, 201…
validVariation in Universal Dependencies annotation: A token-based typological case study on adpossessive constructions
In this paper we present a method for identifying and analyzing adnominal possessive constructions in 66 Universal Dependencies treebanks. We classify adpossessive constructions in terms of their morphological type (locu…
Typologically Informed Parameter Aggregation
Massively multilingual language models enable cross-lingual generalization but underperform on low-resource and unseen languages. While adapter-based fine-tuning offers a parameter-efficient solution, training language-s…
Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual TransferMade for Each Other: Broad-coverage Semantic Structures Meet Preposition Supersenses
Universal Conceptual Cognitive Annotation (UCCA; Abend and Rappoport, 2013) is a typologically-informed, broad-coverage semantic annotation scheme that describes coarse-grained predicate-argument structure but currently …
A Principled Framework for Evaluating on Typologically Diverse Languages
Beyond individual languages, multilingual natural language processing (NLP) research increasingly aims to develop models that perform well across languages generally. However, evaluating these systems on all the world's …