Comparative Concepts or Descriptive Categories: a UD Case study

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Matthieu Pierre Boyer, Mathieu Dehouck

Published: 2025, Last Modified: 09 Mar 2026NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: In this paper, we present a series of methods used to quantify the soundness of using the same names to annotate cases in different languages. We follow the idea described by Martin Haspelmath that descriptive categories and comparative concepts are different objects and we look at the necessary simplification taken by the Universal Dependencies project. We thus compare cases in closely related languages as belonging to commensurable descriptive categories. Then we look at the corresponding underlying comparative concepts. We finally looked at the possibility of assigning cases to adpositions.