CoNLL-U Format in UD v2
Some of the changes adopted in v2 require modifications to the CoNLL-U format. Whenever possible, we have tried to do this in the least disruptive fashion possible, keeping backward compatibility as far as we can. In particular, we have decided against changing the number of fields and/or their meaning for fear of breaking people’s tools. We make the following changes for v2:
- Allow spaces in the
FORM
andLEMMA
fields (see word segmentation) - Let the
DEPS
field contain the entire enhanced dependency graph (not only additional relations on top of the basic trees) (see enhanced dependencies) - Allow empty nodes with an indexing scheme distinct from both tokens and words and with relations in the
DEPS
field (see ellipsis) - Standardize sentence-level metadata
- Restrict the use of the
MISC
field for ease of processing
Enhanced representation in the DEPS field
The deps
field holds the enhanced representation. Unlike previously thought, it seems a better idea for the DEPS
field to hold the entire enhanced parsed graph, not only a smaller set of relations on top of the base layer in HEAD+DEPREL
. The primary reason is that minimally the ellipsis relations and in future undoubtedly many others are not a part of the enhanced graph but are rather replaced by some relations in it. See enhanced dependencies.
Empty nodes in the enhanced representation
A mechanism is needed for empty nodes in the enhanced representation (the base representation will always be empty-node-free). These will be on their separate lines indexed as 2.1
which means “the first empty node after the syntactic word indexed 2”. This line would be placed right after the word 2. Naturally, these empty nodes can be
referred to only from the DEPS
field.
Grepping out all lines which start with E is now sufficient to obtain a CoNLL-U file without empty nodes whose HEAD
and DEPREL
fields behave as usual.
1 Mary _ _ _ _ 2 nsubj 2:nsubj _ 2 won _ _ _ _ 0 root 0:root _ 3 silver _ _ _ _ 2 obj 2:obj _ 4 and _ _ _ _ 5 cc E5.1:cc _ 5 Sue _ _ _ _ 2 conj E5.1:nsubj _ 5.1 _ _ _ _ _ 2 conj 2:conj _ 6 bronze _ _ _ _ 5 orphan E5.1:dobj _
Sentence-level metadata
Sentence-level metadata can be provided as before and all tools are required to pass it through, as before. No particular requirements are put on these fields other than “no trailing whitespace”. Several recognized key = value pairs should be standardized:
- sent_id = global_sentence_id
- text = sentence text
sent_id
is compulsory and as per #321 it should not contain the /
(slash) character.
MISC field
The only global requirement on the MISC
field is that it can be split on the |
(bar) character without any complex processing of escaping. The requirement of MISC
containing zero whitespace characters is dropped. Of course no TAB characters are allowed and no trailing whitespace is allowed. It is likely that spacesBefore
and spacesAfter
will be standardized as a part of the MISC
field.