= Universal Dependencies
{c}
<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.<Universal Dependencies annotation guidelines>[project introduction and Morphology: General Principles, representation layers]{ref}
For `Birds fly`, a compatible analysis identifies `Birds` as a <noun> with plural <grammatical number>, gives it the <lemma (linguistics)> `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.<Universal Dependencies annotation guidelines>[Syntax: General Principles, basic versus enhanced representation]{ref} 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.
Back to article page
