Universal Dependencies: A cross-linguistic typology

Revisiting the now de facto standard Stanford dependency representation, we propose an improved taxonomy to capture grammatical relations across languages, including morphologically rich ones. We suggest a two-layered taxonomy: a set of broadly attested universal grammatical relations, to which language-specific relations can be added. We emphasize the lexicalist stance of the Stanford Dependencies, which leads to a particular, partially new treatment of compounding, prepositions, and morphology. We show how existing dependency schemes for several languages map onto the universal taxonomy proposed here and close with consideration of practical implications of dependency representation choices for NLP applications, in particular parsing. This paper is a minor revision of our LREC 2014 paper “Universal Stanford dependencies: A cross-linguistic typology”. The content is largely identical, but the taxonomy of relations has been revised to be consistent with the final Universal Dependencies (UD) taxonomy for version 1.0 described at http://universaldependencies.github.io/docs/. Version of 2015-11-12.