@inproceedings{weissweiler-etal-2024-ucxn,
    title = "{UC}xn: Typologically Informed Annotation of Constructions Atop {U}niversal {D}ependencies",
    author = {Weissweiler, Leonie  and
      B{\"o}bel, Nina  and
      Guiller, Kirian  and
      Herrera, Santiago  and
      Scivetti, Wesley  and
      Lorenzi, Arthur  and
      Melnik, Nurit  and
      Bhatia, Archna  and
      Sch{\"u}tze, Hinrich  and
      Levin, Lori  and
      Zeldes, Amir  and
      Nivre, Joakim  and
      Croft, William  and
      Schneider, Nathan},
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1471",
    pages = "16919--16932",
    abstract = "The Universal Dependencies (UD) project has created an invaluable collection of treebanks with contributions in over 140 languages. However, the UD annotations do not tell the full story. Grammatical constructions that convey meaning through a particular combination of several morphosyntactic elements{---}for example, interrogative sentences with special markers and/or word orders{---}are not labeled holistically. We argue for (i) augmenting UD annotations with a {`}UCxn{'} annotation layer for such meaning-bearing grammatical constructions, and (ii) approaching this in a typologically informed way so that morphosyntactic strategies can be compared across languages. As a case study, we consider five construction families in ten languages, identifying instances of each construction in UD treebanks through the use of morphosyntactic patterns. In addition to findings regarding these particular constructions, our study yields important insights on methodology for describing and identifying constructions in language-general and language-particular ways, and lays the foundation for future constructional enrichment of UD treebanks.",
}

The Universal Dependencies (UD) project has created an invaluable collection of treebanks with contributions in over 140 languages. However, the UD annotations do not tell the full story. Grammatical constructions that convey meaning through a particular combination of several morphosyntactic elements{---}for example, interrogative sentences with special markers and/or word orders{---}are not labeled holistically. We argue for (i) augmenting UD annotations with a {`}UCxn{'} annotation layer for such meaning-bearing grammatical constructions, and (ii) approaching this in a typologically informed way so that morphosyntactic strategies can be compared across languages. As a case study, we consider five construction families in ten languages, identifying instances of each construction in UD treebanks through the use of morphosyntactic patterns. In addition to findings regarding these particular constructions, our study yields important insights on methodology for describing and identifying constructions in language-general and language-particular ways, and lays the foundation for future constructional enrichment of UD treebanks.
Weissweiler, Leonie B{\"o}bel, Nina Guiller, Kirian Herrera, Santiago Scivetti, Wesley Lorenzi, Arthur Melnik, Nurit Bhatia, Archna Sch{\"u}tze, Hinrich Levin, Lori Zeldes, Amir Nivre, Joakim Croft, William Schneider, Nathan
UCxn: Typologically Informed Annotation of Constructions Atop Universal Dependencies