Universal Dependencies is a framework for comparable grammatical annotation across languages. It combines part of speech labels, morphological features and typed syntactic dependencies, while allowing documented language-specific choices. The framework supplies a common representation rather than a claim that all languages express every distinction identically.[ref]
Universal Dependencies annotation guidelines. project introduction and Morphology: General Principles, representation layers
For
Birds fly, a compatible analysis identifies Birds as a noun with plural grammatical number, gives it the lemma bird, and links it to fly with the subject relation nsubj. These are distinct annotation decisions: changing a lexical convention need not require changing the sentence's dependency structure.Basic dependencies form a rooted tree, whereas an enhanced representation can contain additional relations and need not remain a tree.[ref]
Universal Dependencies annotation guidelines. Syntax: General Principles, basic versus enhanced representation
Keeping the layers explicit helps compare parser output and manually analyzed text corpus resources. A valid interchange file and an empirically justified grammatical analysis remain different achievements. Articles by others on the same topic
Universal Dependencies (UD) is a framework for the representation of grammar across different languages that aims to create a consistent and universal syntactic structure. The goal of UD is to provide a common linguistically motivated framework for annotating the grammatical relationships between words in a sentence, making it easier to compare linguistic phenomena across languages and to develop natural language processing (NLP) tools that can work with multiple languages.