Universal Dependencies

Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Christopher D Manning, Joakim Nivre, Daniel Zeman

Abstract:

Universal dependencies (UD) is a framework for morphosyntactic annotation
of human language, which to date has been used to create treebanks for more
than 100 languages. In this article, we outline the linguistic theory of
the UD framework, which draws on a long tradition of typologically oriented
grammatical theories. Grammatical relations between words are centrally
used to explain how predicate--argument structures are encoded
morphosyntactically in different languages while morphological features and
part-of-speech classes give the properties of words. We argue that this
theory is a good basis for cross-linguistically consistent annotation of
typologically diverse languages in a way that supports computational
natural language understanding as well as broader linguistic studies.