InterCorp Release 13ud – Universal Dependencies

InterCorp release 13ud contains the same texts as InterCorp release 13, both versions differ only in their linguistic annotation. However, due to a different way of tokenization, token counts in release 13ud can slightly differ.

• In release 13ud, out of the total number of 41 languages ​​(including Czech), 36 are linguistically annotated; in addition, all such languages ​​are syntactically annotated.
• Texts are annotated in the same way in all languages, according to the UD standard ( Universal Dependencies).
• General guidelines for annotation are provided on the UD project website (UD Guidelines), including a detailed description of:
  • word types (Universal POS tags)
  • morphological categories (Universal features)
  • syntactic functions (Universal Dependency Relations)
• Annotation was performed for all languages ​​by UDPipe, based on the data created in the UD project.¹⁾
• For use in KonText, fused forms or aggregates, ie word forms composed of two or even three syntactic words, were modified as divided tokens. In Czech it concerns, for example, the forms ses (se+jsi) or oč (o+co), in English isn't or cannot, in German zur (zu+der) or am (an+dem), in Polish miałam (miała+m), žebyś (że+by+ś) or chciałbym (chciał+by+m), in French des (de+les), aux (à+les) or auquel (à+lequel).²⁾
• Some attributes were added to facilitate orientation in the syntactic structure. These data include references to important properties of the syntactic governor (lemma, part of speech and morphological categories). If a content word occurs with a function word (eg preposition, auxiliary verb, subordinate conjunction, determiner), the content word includes some properties of the function word.
• Frequently used morphological categories from the features list (feats) have been promoted to the status of regular attributes. This applies, for example, to morphological case, number and gender (case, number, gender), or person.
• Annotations between languages ​​differ only in the number of attributes, see List of attributes by language, described below in Description of the list of Attributes.
• KonText makes supports queries by word class and other morphological categories using the Insert tag function, which inserts a UD POS (upos) and any category from the feats list into the query. The Insert tag feature is available for all linguistically annotated languages.

• A basic query for a word form or phrase is entered in the same way as in previous releases of InterCorp.³⁾

• As in previous releases of InterCorp, a lemma and a morphological tag can be entered in an advanced query. For most linguistically annotated languages ​​(except be, da, en, fr, hu, no and ru) it is possible to enter a tag from a language-specific set (national tagset), usually identical to the set used in the previous releases of InterCorp for that language. Just use the xpos attribute instead of the tag attribute. E.g. the query on feminine nouns in the vocative singular in Czech can be entered as follows: [xpos = "NNFS5.*"].
• According to UD, part of speech and morphological categories are listed separately as values ​​of the attributes upos and feats, respectively. Their values ​​can be entered using the Insert tag function. A query for proper names without using the Insert tag function can be specified as follows: [upos = "PROPN"].

• Morphological categories are given as a pair <category name> = <category value>. These pairs are listed as list items under the feats attribute and are separated by the | character. E.g. for the Czech noun moře 'sea' in the nominative, the morphological categories as the value of the feats attribute are listed as follows: Case=Nom|Gender=Neut|Number=Sing|Polarity=Pos. The form moře annotated in this way can be found, for example, by the query [upos="NOUN" & feats="Number=Sing"] .
• Some categories are also available outside the feats list, so the same query can be entered more easily: [upos="NOUN" & number="Sing"] . For technical reasons, category names outside the feats list are given in lowercase, including, for example, verb_form instead of VerbForm.
• The same or comparable morphological categories and their values have the same name in all languages:

• When entering an advanced query, you can use the Insert tag function, which lets you select the POS and/or the values of the relevant categories (properties) from the feats list in all linguistically annotated languages. The offer of properties for a given POS is determined by their actual occurrence in the corpus, so the list may reflect incorrect combinations.

• Syntactic function is specified for each token as the value of the deprel attribute.
• E.g. a query to show the occurrences of the verb běhat 'run' in the function of the governor of an adnominal clause, is entered as [lemma="run" & deprel="acl"].
• The table below distinguishes four types of syntactic functions by different typeface:
  • Common deprels are listed in bold.
  • Deprels of function words are listed in bold italics.
  • Deprels for representing coordination and similar phenomena in the dependency structure or for a technical purpose are set in italics.
  • Deprels not used in Czech are listed in in gray.

• After clicking on the keyword and Formatted text in the context box header, a concordance will appear along with the nearest context in a form that is close to the typography of the original text. For example, there are no spaces between the end of a word and punctuation, and paragraphs are separated by a blank line.

• After clicking on the syntax tree icon at the beginning of each concordance line, the syntactic structure of the sentence is displayed. For each node, the word form, POS and syntactic function of the word relative to the given token are given. After clicking on the node, other annotation will appear, especially the lemma of the form.
• Multi-part tokens (aggregates) are divided into multiple nodes and the word form then corresponds to the relevant part of the token (the iword attribute). After clicking on such a node, in addition to the lemma of the given part of the multi-word token, its full form (as a separate word, the sword attribute) and the word form of the entire token (word) also appear.
• In the text line above the structure and in the structure, under the cursor the relevant strings and nodes are highlighted in parallel.

• The queries assume the Czech subcorpus, except when stated otherwise.

[case_lemma="o" & case="Acc"]

- Finds accusative nominals in with the preposition o. The governing verbs can be listed using frequency distribution according to the attribute p_lemma.

[deprel="obj" & case="Dat" | deprel="conj" & p_deprel="obj" & case="Dat"]

- Finds dative objects, even non-initial conjuncts.

[deprel="nsubj" & upos="PROPN" | deprel="conj" & p_deprel="nsubj" & upos="PROPN"]

- Finds proper nouns as subjects, even non-initial conjuncts.

[upos="NOUN" & case="Ins" & deprel="obj" & p_feats="VerbForm=Inf"]

- Finds nouns in the instrumental case as objects of an infinitive. The infinitives can be listed using frequency distribution according to the attribute p_lemma.

[feats="Gender=Neut" & feats="Number=Sing" & feats="Tense=Past" & feats="VerbForm=Part" & upos="VERB" & aux_feats="Person=1"]

- Finds l-participles in neuter singular used with an auxiliary verb in the first person. The query for the participle was entered using the function Insert tag. The same result is obtained by the following query, which uses categorial attributes outside the feats list:

[gender="Neut" & number="Sing" & tense="Past" & verb_form="Part" & upos="VERB" & aux_feats="Person=1"]

1:[lemma="vidět|slyšet"] []* 2:[case="Acc" & deprel="obj"] []* 3:[verb_form="Inf" & deprel="xcomp"] & 2.head=1.id & 3.head=1.id within <s/>

- Finds sentences with verbs vidět 'see' or slyšet 'hear' governing an accusative object and an infinitive xcomp. There can be any number of other words between these tokens, but only within the sentence.

[voice="Act" & aux_feats="Mood=Cnd" & aux_feats="Tense=Past"]

– Finds sentences including a verb in the active voice and past conditional mood, e.g. Kdybych si nebyl oholil knír … 'If I hadn't shaved my moustache…'

[voice="Pass" & aux_feats="Mood=Cnd" & aux_feats=".*Tense=Past.*Tense=Past.*"]

– Finds sentences including a verb in the passive voice and past conditional mood, e.g. … aféra by byla bývala ututlána. '… the scandal would have been hushed up.'^{5) 6)}

[feats="VerbForm=Ger" & aux_feats="VerbForm=Fin" & aux_feats="VerbForm=Part"]

– In English: finds sentences including continuous perfect forms (both present and past), e.g. … has been constantly increasing in velocity.

• In UD, part of speech is listed separately from other categories.
• Parts of speech are the same for all languages.
• Part of speech is given as the value of the attribute upos.
• For most languages, the xpos attribute includes a language-specific morphological tag.

• Other categories are determined by part of speech and language.
• Each category is listed as a “<category name>=<category value>” pair, e.g. Number=Sg.
• A list of such pairs is the value of the feats attribute.
• Categories in the feats attribute are separated by “|”, e.g. the form школы in genitive singular is marked as Animacy=Inan|Case=Gen|Gender=Fem|Number=Sing.
• A CQL query can specify each part of the tag separately, e.g. [upos="NOUN" & feats="Gender=Fem" & feats="Case=Gen"] (the order of categories is irrelevant).
• The query can also be formulated on a string of characters, e.g. [upos="NOUN" & feats=".*Case=Gen.*Gender=Fem.*"]. The result is the same in both cases.
• Some of the categories in feats are also listed as additional attributes. These attributes can be used in searches or to generate frequency lists.

• Some tokens, called aggregates, consist of multiple parts.
• These parts correspond to different nodes in the syntactic structure.
• Such tokens in Czech include forms such as abychom, ses, bylas or oč).
• Parts of such tokens are separated by the “|” character.
• The parts are given both in the form corresponding to the original form (e.g. se|s) and in the form that would correspond to its unabbreviated version (e.g. se|jsi).
• Multi-part tokens are searched for as full forms in all languages. This is the case, for example, with English contractions (can't) or Polish agglutinated forms (byłbym).

• Each token specifies its syntactic function, i.e. dependency relation (deprel) and a reference to its syntactic governor (head).

• In addition to the head reference, some other attributes of the head are listed for each token: lemma, POS, morphological category, syntactic function.
• A token may also have attributes that specify the properties of a fuction word that depends on the token.
• Similar means of representing syntactic structure are used by other syntactically annotated corpora available in the KonText browser (e.g. syn2020).

• According to UD, function words include auxiliary verbs, adpositions, subordinating conjunctions, conjunctions, determiners, and quantifiers.
• Function words depend on the corresponding content words.
• Types of function words are specified by their syntactic function.
• For each function word the content word governor may include the function word's lemma, upos, feats and a more detailed specification of type.
• The names of the corresponding content word attributes consist of the function word's deprel and attribute.
• For example, case_lemma specifies the lemma of the noun or pronoun's preposition.

• The first conjunct depends on the governor of the entire coordination. Its syntactic function determines the syntactic function of the whole coordination.
• The second and subsequent conjuncts always depend on the first conjunct. Their syntactic function is specified as conj.
• Conjunctions depend on the following conjunct. Their syntactic function is cc.
• A reference to the so-called effective head is used to identify the head regardless of whether the token is a conjunct or not, or whether it is in the initial or non-initial conjunct.

• In Attribute list by language, all attributes used in the corpus are listed.
• Columns indicate whether the attribute is used for the language specified by the abbreviation in the header.
• Attributes are divided into four categories, distinguished by background color.

• These 12 attributes are on the light purple background.
• They consist of the following items: word form, lemma, part of speech, morphological categories, token order in a sentence, head reference and syntactic function.
• They are usually taken directly from the output of the tool UDPipe. The format of the output is CoNLL-U.
• There are two added attributes: lc and lc_lemma, which repeat word form and lemma without any capital letters.
• For languages ​​with multipart tokens (aggregates), there are also two additional sword and iword attributes.
• The sword attribute includes the word form of the aggregate split by the “|” character into parts corresponding to syntactic words as they occur outside an aggregate, e.g. for nač and abychom the values of sword equal na|co and aby|bychom.
• The iword attribute splits the aggregate into parts without any modification, for the tokens nač and abychom the values of iword egual na|č and a|bychom.

• These 7 attributes are on the light blue background.
• They extend the reference to the token's syntactic governor (head) by additional attributes, making it easier to identify the head and its properties.
• All attributes of this type are avaliable for all languages.

• These attributes are on the light green background.
• They are given within the content word in order to specify the essential properties of the dependent function word.
• The total number of function word attributes is 20, but no language uses them all.
• Attributes refer to 6 types of auxiliary words, determined by their syntactic function in relation to the semantic word.
• For each function word, the lemma, part of speech, morphological categories and subtype of the function word can be specified.
• An attribute name consists of the name of the function word's syntactic function and the name of its property (attribute).
• Unused or uninformative attributes are absent for the given language. There are four possible combinations which do not occur in any language.
• Most languages ​​(35) use the attribute case_lemma (lemma of apposition, most often prepositions), followed by mark_lemma (lemma of subordinate conjunctions, in 33 languages).
• The clf_lemma (lemma of classifier) ​​attribute only appears in Chinese.
• If there are several auxiliaries of the same type for a content word, their values ​​are separated by the “|” character.

• On the light brown background, there is a selection of 18 attributes from the feats list.
• Only Latvian uses them all, while Maltese uses none. In addition to the language type, their presence or absence also depends on the availability of the category in the UD data.

• POS and morphological categories do not match
• Inconsistencies in the application of the principles of uniform classification of phenomena in all languages
• Errors and inconsistencies in the given language (e.g. udělals as a unitary token)

The quality of annotations in different languages differs mainly in the volume and quality of training data. It is also affected by the method and tool used for annotation.

We will be grateful for every reported error, discrepancy, deficiency, comment and suggestion at the address CNC user support. Please include the abbreviation “UD” at the beginning of the message subject.

Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Christopher Manning, Joakim Nivre, Daniel Zeman (2021): Universal Dependencies. In: Computational Linguistics, ISSN 1530-9312, vol. 47, no. 2, pp. 255-308.

Daniel Zeman (2018): The World of Tokens, Tags and Trees. ISBN 978-80-88132-09-7.

For a complete list, see here.

Daniel Zeman: Universal Dependencies and the Slavic Languages. Warsaw, 19.11.2018.

Joakim Nivre, Daniel Zeman, Filip Ginter, Francis M. Tyers: Tutorial on Universal Dependencies: Adding a new language to UD

Anna Nedoluzhko, Michal Novak, Martin Popel, Zdenek Zabokrtsky and Daniel Zeman: Coreference meets Universal Dependencies. Prague, 19/04/2021.

Daniel Zeman: Reflexives in Universal Dependencies. Prague, 04/03/2019.