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.

Multi-view learning makes use of diverse models arising from multiple sources of input or different feature subsets for the same task. For example, a given natural language processing task can combine evidence from models arising from character, morpheme, lexical, or phrasal views. The most common strategy with multi-view learning, especially popular in the neural network community, is to unify multiple representations into one unified vector through concatenation, averaging, or pooling, and then build a single-view model on top of the unified representation. As an alternative, we examine whether building one model per view and then unifying the different models can lead to improvements, especially in low-resource scenarios. More specifically, taking inspiration from co-training methods, we propose a semi-supervised learning approach based on multi-view models through consensus promotion, and investigate whether this improves overall performance. To test the multi-view hypothesis, we use moderately low-resource scenarios for nine languages and test the performance of the joint model for part-of-speech tagging and dependency parsing. The proposed model shows significant improvements across the test cases, with average gains of -0.9 ∼ +9.3 labeled attachment score (LAS) points. We also investigate the effect of unlabeled data on the proposed model by varying the amount of training data and by using different domains of unlabeled data.

In this paper, we present our multilingual dependency parser developed for the CoNLL 2017 UD Shared Task dealing with "Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies" 1 . Our parser extends the monolingual BIST-parser as a multi-source multilingual trainable parser. Thanks to multilingual word embeddings and one hot encodings for languages, our system can use both monolingual and multi-source training. We trained 69 monolingual language models and 13 multilingual models for the shared task. Our multilingual approach making use of different resources yield better results than the monolingual approach for 11 languages. Our system ranked 5 th and achieved 70.93 overall LAS score over the 81 test corpora (macro-averaged LAS F1 score).

Two Komi-Zyrian treebanks were included in the Universal Dependencies 2.2 release. This article contextualizes the treebanks, discusses the process through which they were created, and outlines the future plans and timeline for the next improvements. Special attention is paid to the possibilities of using UD in the documentation and description of endangered languages.

This paper describes the test of a dependency parsing method which is based on bidirectional LSTM feature representations and multilingual word embedding, and evaluates the results on mono-and multilingual data. The results are similar in all cases, with a slightly better results achieved using multilingual data. The languages under investigation are Komi-Zyrian and Russian. Examination of the results by relation type shows that some language specific constructions are correctly recognized even when they appear in naturally occurring code-switching data. TiivistelmäTutkimus arvioi dependenssianalyysin menetelmää, joka perustuu kaksisuuntaiseen LSTM-piirrerepresentaatioon ja monikieliseen 'word embedding' -malliin, sekä arvioi tuloksia yksi-ja monikielisissä aineistoissa. Tulokset ovat samantapaisia, mutta hieman korkeampia moni-kuin yksikielisissä aineistoissa. Tutkitut kielet ovat komisyrjääni ja venäjä. Tulosten yksityiskohtaisempi analyysi riippuvuuksien mukaan osoittaa, että tietyt kielikohtaiset suhteet on tunnistettu oikein jopa niiden esiintyessä luonnollisissa koodinvaihtoa sisältävissä lauseissa.This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence. Licence details: