Semantic Categories in UD v2
Some of our current relations (i.e., u-dep/name and u-dep/neg) seem to primarily encode semantic distinctions (rather than syntactic). We propose the following changes for v2:
- Remove u-dep/neg and instead encode negation as a feature
- Rename u-dep/name to flat and extend its usage beyond names (for example, include titles)
Remove neg
We suggest getting rid of the u-dep/neg relation which is not syntactic. Instead we will use
- ordinary syntactic relations like u-dep/advmod, u-dep/aux, etc.
- a feature Negative=Neg on the negative word to preserve the information about negation
Rename name and modify its use
The name label is another one that has led to confusion. It was not intended to be used for all named entities, but only for names consisting of multiple nominal elements. We suggest keeping the relation but renaming it to flat to (a) avoid the impression that it should capture named entities in general, and (b) indicate that the relation is only appropriate when there is no clear syntactic head. After we have dropped the direct association with names, we can also extend the use of this relation to titles (“Mrs.”, “President”, etc.) in languages where they do not show clear head or dependent properties. Finally, consistent with the proposed changes for other headless constructions, we propose that arrows should be drawn from righ to left (see multiword expressions).
Hillary Rodham Clinton
flat(Clinton, Hillary)
flat(Clinton, Rodham)
Monsieur Louis Pignon
flat(Pignon, Monsieur)
flat(Pignon, Louis)
In case of foreign phrases that are phrasal or clausal names and where we do not (or cannot) give a compositional analysis, we use u-dep/foreign instead of flat, because the latter is restricted to sequences of nominal elements that do not have a (clear) phrasal structure.
The French title of the book is " Harry à l' école des sorciers ".
foreign(sorciers, Harry)
foreign(sorciers, à)
foreign(sorciers, l')
foreign(sorciers, école)
foreign(sorciers, des)