UD Brainstorming Meeting
Pisa, September 18, 2017
Discussion points
- Documentation
- Constructions
- Multi-word expressions
- Treebank naming / flags
- How to use the repositories?
- Enhanced dependencies
Documentation
(see also list of issues/ideas on this page)
- There is a consensus that the website should be organized around constructions. This should make it easier to find how a construction should be analyzed and should provide a more holistic view on analysis (E.g., passives in English are purely a dependency phenomenon, whereas passives in Swedish concern dependencies and morphological features)
- Majority of the discussion so far focused on how the website would be most useful for UD contributors. We should also consider other use cases and make sure the website also meets other users’ needs.
- High priority should be given to developing a template to provide a short documentation of treebanks (much simpler than full language-specific documentation).
- Having a completely parallel language-specific documentation was too ambitious and is not really user-friendly.
- The search should allow synonyms for constructions (similar to the “redirected from” feature on Wikipedia).
- We need rules for the contribution process. Who can edit the universal guidelines? How should changes be approved?
- The quality of treebanks varies a lot, which is not reflected. One idea is to have a rating system for the quality of a treebank (stars?) and a badge system for adding documentation, similar to the badge system on Stackoverflow.
- Perhaps there should be wiki-style links from one construction to another, with special formatting if the page is missing.
- Sometimes examples on website contradict examples in treebanks. Often unclear which one of the two is correct.
- The search should be improved so that one can search for examples in the documentation.
- We should consider having tags for pages to make it easier to find constructions etc.
- First step should be to define the use cases and then go from there.
- It is hard to find “controversial” sentences in treebanks. Often maintainers are uncertain about certain analyses but there is no way to flag that. There should be a method to flag these sentences in treebanks.
Working group: Filip Ginter, Dan Zeman, Alexandre Rademaker, Teresa Lynn, Sylvain Kahane, Jenna Kanerva, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Sebastian Schuster
Constructions
- We should have pages discussing constructions that exist in many languages.
- The list of constructions will be developed in the process of working out proposals for constructions. This will probably be a combination of a bottom-up (constructions suggested by the community) and a top-down (small group decides on the list of constructions) process.
- Work on specific constructions can already start before we have a list.
- List of constructions in WALS might be a starting point for a list of constructions, but probably not complete.
- Working groups that work out guidelines/descriptions of specific constructions should consider existing typological works.
- The goal of construction documentation should be the best solution, not the current state of the treebanks.
- Deviations from this ideal state should be documented in the language-specific documentation.
- BUT: When considering new analyses/analyses that differ from current annotation practices, consider “Ginter’s razor”. Complex changes should only be made when they substantially improve things.
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Constructions should have a holistic view on different annotation levels. They should not just be about dependency relations, but also discuss POS tags and morphology.
- List of some constructions that should be discussed (and person responsible for working out a proposal):
- Some documentation already exists:
- Coordination - ?
- Ellipsis - ?
- Nonverbal predicates with or without copula - ?
- Secondary predication (acl -> advcl) - Joakim Nivre
- Multi-word expression - Kim Gerdes (should perhaps be harmonized with work from PARSEME cost action)
- Comparative constructions - Dan Zeman
- Parataxis - Sylvain Kahane
- Punctuation - ?
- No substantial documentation exists:
- Expletives - Marie Candito
- Clefts - Teresa Lynn
- Causatives - Sylvain Kahane
- Existentials - Fran Tyers
- Partitives - ?
- Complex predicates (maybe part of MWEs?) - ?
- POS tags - Simonetta Montemagni
- Names - Joakim Nivre
- Apposition - ?
- Some documentation already exists:
Multi-word expressions
- Unclear what to do about POS tags of fixed expressions such as in spite of. Should we use the same tag for all parts of a fixed expression?
- Unclear what to do about names. When should we provide a syntactic analysis for things like movie titles and when should it be a
flatconstruction?
Working group: Kim Gerdes (as part of the “MWE” group above), Joakim Nivre (as part of the “names” group above).
Flags
- The use of flags is not always appropriate for treebanks and in some cases, it can also be interpreted as taking a political stance.
Decision: Treebank maintainers can decide whether they want to have a flag displayed next to the treebank or not.
How to use the repositories?
- Some groups use their own repositories for developing the treebanks and just use the UD repo to release their treebanks, while other groups use the UD repo for development and release.
- There should be guidelines on how the official UD repositories can be used for developing the treebanks.
Working Group: Dan Zeman, Filip Ginter
Enhanced dependencies
- Guidelines are not as mature as for basic dependencies at this point, especially for languages other than English.
- There exist multiple proposals to go beyond what the v2 guidelines say (e.g., Candito et al. (2017)), and maybe we want to incorporate some of these into the official guidelines.
- There might be an enhanced dependencies parsing track at the UD Shared Task 2018.
- There is big interest from the NLP community in further developing the enhanced representation and providing it for more languages. (according to informal survey at EMNLP by Joakim).
Working Group: Sebastian Schuster, Marie Candito