Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection

TL;DR

Universal Dependencies v2 introduces updated guidelines and expands a multilingual treebank collection, enabling consistent syntactic annotation across 90 languages within a dependency-based framework.

Contribution

This paper presents the new UD v2 guidelines and provides an overview of the extensive multilingual treebank collection now available.

Findings

Expanded to 90 languages with comprehensive treebanks

Major updates to annotation guidelines from UD v1 to UD v2

Facilitates cross-linguistic syntactic analysis

Abstract

Universal Dependencies is an open community effort to create cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages within a dependency-based lexicalist framework. The annotation consists in a linguistically motivated word segmentation; a morphological layer comprising lemmas, universal part-of-speech tags, and standardized morphological features; and a syntactic layer focusing on syntactic relations between predicates, arguments and modifiers. In this paper, we describe version 2 of the guidelines (UD v2), discuss the major changes from UD v1 to UD v2, and give an overview of the currently available treebanks for 90 languages.