In this paper, we compare different ways to annotate both syntactic and morphological relations in a dependency treebank and we propose new formats we call mSUD and mUD, compatible with the Universal Dependencies (UD) schema for syntactic treebanks. We emphasize mSUD rather than mUD, the former being based on distributional criteria for the choice of the head of any combination, which allow us to clearly encode the internal structure of a word, that is, the derivational path. We investigate different problems posed by a morph-based annotation, concerning tokenization, choice of the head of a morph combination, relations between morphs, additional features needed, such as the token type differentiating roots and derivational and inflectional affixes. We show how our annotation schema can be applied to different languages from polysynthetic languages such as Yupik to isolating languages such as Chinese.

You Zuo, Kim Gerdes, Éric Clergerie, Benoît Sagot. Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

In this paper we present Arborator-Grew, a collaborative annotation tool for treebank development. Arborator-Grew combines the features of two preexisting tools: Arborator and Grew. Arborator is a widely used collaborative graphical online dependency treebank annotation tool. Grew is a tool for graph querying and rewriting specialized in structures needed in NLP, i.e. syntactic and semantic dependency trees and graphs. Grew also has an online version, Grew-match, where all Universal Dependencies treebanks in their classical, deep and surface-syntactic flavors can be queried. Arborator-Grew is a complete redevelopment and modernization of Arborator, replacing its own internal database storage by a new Grew API, which adds a powerful query tool to Arborator’s existing treebank creation and correction features. This includes complex access control for parallel expert and crowd-sourced annotation, tree comparison visualization, and various exercise modes for teaching and training of annotators. Arborator-Grew opens up new paths of collectively creating, updating, maintaining, and curating syntactic treebanks and semantic graph banks.

This paper describes a minimal topology driven parsing algorithm for topological grammars that synchronizes a rewriting grammar and a dependency grammar, obtaining two linguistically motivated syntactic structures. The use of non-local slash and visitor features can be restricted to obtain a CKY type analysis in polynomial time. German long distance phenomena illustrate the algorithm, bringing to the fore the procedural needs of the analyses of syntax-topology mismatches in constraint based approaches like for example HPSG.

This paper proposes a description of German word order including phenomena considered as complex, such as scrambling, (partial) VP fronting and verbal pied piping. Our description relates a syntactic dependency structure directly to a topological hierarchy without resorting to movement or similar mechanisms.