Coordination Structures in Dependency Treebanks

Martin Popel, David Marecek, Jan Stepánek, Daniel Zeman, Zdenek Zabokrtský

Abstract: Paratactic syntactic structures are notoriously difficult to represent in dependency formalisms. This has painful consequences such as high frequency of parsing errors related to coordination. In other words, coordination is a pending problem in dependency analysis of natural languages. This paper tries to shed some light on this area by bringing a systematizing view of various formal means developed for encoding coordination structures. We introduce a novel taxonomy of such approaches and apply it to treebanks across a typologically diverse range of 26 languages. In addition, empirical observations on convertibility between selected styles of representations are shown too.