A framework for (under)specifying dependency syntax without overloading annotators

TL;DR

This paper presents a lightweight dependency syntax annotation framework that allows for underspecification to streamline annotation, demonstrated across three languages with algorithms to evaluate and compare annotations.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel formalism for dependency syntax annotation that supports underspecification and simplifies the annotation workflow.

Findings

Effective annotation across three languages

Algorithms for evaluating underspecified annotations

Streamlined annotation process

Abstract

We introduce a framework for lightweight dependency syntax annotation. Our formalism builds upon the typical representation for unlabeled dependencies, permitting a simple notation and annotation workflow. Moreover, the formalism encourages annotators to underspecify parts of the syntax if doing so would streamline the annotation process. We demonstrate the efficacy of this annotation on three languages and develop algorithms to evaluate and compare underspecified annotations.