Morphosyntactic Annotation Research Articles

Morphosyntactic Annotation in Literary Stylometry

This article investigates the stylometric usefulness of morphosyntactic annotation. Focusing on the style of literary texts, it argues that including morphosyntactic annotation in analyses of style has at least two important advantages: (1) maintaining a topic agnostic approach and (2) providing input variables that are interpretable in traditional grammatical terms. This study demonstrates how widely available Universal Dependency parsers can generate useful morphological and syntactic data for texts in a range of languages. These data can serve as the basis for input features that are strongly informative about the style of individual novels, as indicated by accuracy in classification tests. The interpretability of such features is demonstrated by a discussion of the weakness of an “authorial” signal as opposed to the clear distinction among individual works.

Documentation and annotations of Megrelian texts in FLEx

Megrelian is an unwritten Kartvelian language subdivided into two dialects Zugdidi-Samurzaqano and Senaki-Martvili. Following the approaches widely used in language documentation, the Megrelian texts are described and analyzed by means of FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLEx). The FLeX provides interlinear glossing of data. At this moment the Megrelian database includes 49 analyzed texts (38510 tokens, 26610 unique forms, 3480 sentences). Dialogues and monologues are recorded in both dialect areas and include information about the beliefs, traditions, rituals etc. All texts are represented with free translations in Georgian and English. The analysis includes the following: Wordbase - division into words done automatically; Wordipa - representation of Megrelian text in IPA done by the online converter (Gersamia, Lobzhanidze 2022) developed to convert Megrelian based on Georgian script into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), the ISO 9984 romanization scheme, the Gamkrelidze-Machavariani transliteration system (1965) and vice versa; Morphemes - morphological segmentation of words is done manually. The word is subdivided into root and affixes representing fixed linguistic data; The information on morphemes is given in Lex. Entries, the morphological glossing - in Lex. Gloss, while Lex. Gram. Info describes PoS-es and their appropriate categories. Glossing is done following the Leipzig Glossing Rules and Eurotyp Guidelines; Wordcat - information on PoS-es is given separately as well. The morphosyntactic annotation of Megrelian texts collected during the fieldwork and annotated by means of FLEx will be used as a base for the grammar and online dictionary.

Toward the morpho-syntactic annotation of an Old English corpus with universal dependencies

The aim of this article is to take the first steps toward the compilation of a treebank of Old English compatible with the framework of Universal Dependencies (UD). Such a treebank will comprise morphological and syntactic annotation of Old English texts adequate for cross-linguistic comparison, diachronic analysis and natural language processing. The article, therefore, engages in four tasks: (i) identifying the Old English exponents of UD lexical categories; (ii) selecting the Old English exponents of UD morphological features; (iii) finding the areas of Old English morphology that require token indexing in the UD format; and (iv) checking on the relevance of the universal set of dependency relations. The data have been extracted from ParCorOEv2, an open access annotated parallel corpus Old English-English. The main conclusions are that the annotation format calls for two additional fields (gloss and morphological relatedness) and that enhanced dependencies are required in order to account for some syntactic phenomena.

From Graphematics to Phrasal, Sentential, and Textual Semantics Through Morphosyntax by Means of Corpus-Driven Grammar and Ontology: A Case Study on One Tibetan Text

Abstract This article presents the current results of an ongoing study of the possibilities of fine-tuning automatic morphosyntactic and semantic annotation by means of improving the underlying formal grammar and ontology on the example of one Tibetan text. The ultimate purpose of work at this stage was to improve linguistic software developed for natural-language processing and understanding in order to achieve complete annotation of a specific text and such state of the formal model, in which all linguistic phenomena observed in the text would be explained. This purpose includes the following tasks: analysis of error cases in annotation of the text from the corpus; eliminating these errors in automatic annotation; development of formal grammar and updating of dictionaries. Along with the morpho-syntactic analysis, the current approach involves simultaneous semantic analysis as well. The article describes semantic annotation of the corpus, required by grammar revision and development, which was made with the use of computer ontology. The work is carried out with one of the corpus texts – a grammatical poetic treatise Sum-cu-pa (VII c.).

Universal Dependencies

Abstract Universal dependencies (UD) is a framework for morphosyntactic annotation of human language, which to date has been used to create treebanks for more than 100 languages. In this article, we outline the linguistic theory of the UD framework, which draws on a long tradition of typologically oriented grammatical theories. Grammatical relations between words are centrally used to explain how predicate–argument structures are encoded morphosyntactically in different languages while morphological features and part-of-speech classes give the properties of words. We argue that this theory is a good basis for crosslinguistically consistent annotation of typologically diverse languages in a way that supports computational natural language understanding as well as broader linguistic studies.

Translating Fieldwork into Datasets: The Development of a Corpus for the Quantitative Investigation of Grammatical Phenomena in Eibela

This extended abstract details the process of constructing an annotated XML corpus suitable for quantitative analysis of morphosyntactic and phonetic phenomena in the Eibela language of Papua New Guinea. Preliminary results will also be included, which investigate the semantic, phonetic, and discourse correlates of argument realization. The goal of this paper is to illustrate how legacy materials can be enriched and investigated using computational methodologies including forced alignment of phonetic segments using bulk processing of data in Python and R, the Montreal Forced Aligner (MFA), and morphosyntactic annotation developed as part of the Multilingual Corpus of Annotated Spoken Texts (Multi-CAST).

Korpus języka mówionego mieszkańców Spisza

A Spoken Corpus of Inhabitants of Polish SpiszThe article describes a dialect corpus project that documents the dialect of Polish Spisz. In contrast to the majority of dialectological research in Poland, our corpus also includes the speech of the youngest and middle generations, as its aim is also to document the sociolinguistic situation of the dialect of the region. Recordings have been transcribed into standard Polish orthography, not phonetically, which makes it possible not only to easily search the corpus but also to use existing tools to lemmatize and add morphosyntactic annotation to the texts. Users interested in the phonetic layer can access the recordings on a per-utterance basis. The article describes the stages of compiling the corpus and discusses its potential applications. The authors argue that a large corpus which covers a small, homogeneous area is a more valuable resource for dialectologists than a series of small corpora documenting a larger region.

VLSP Shared Task: Named Entity Recognition

Named entities (NE) are phrases that contain the names of persons, organizations, locations, times and quantities, monetary values, percentages, etc. Named Entity Recognition (NER) is the task of recognizing named entities in documents. NER is an important subtask of Information Extraction, which has attracted researchers all over the world since 1990s. For Vietnamese language, although there exists some research projects and publications on NER task before 2016, no systematic comparison of the performance of NER systems has been done. In 2016, the organizing committee of the VLSP workshop decided to launch the first NER shared task, in order to get an objective evaluation of Vietnamese NER systems and to promote the development of high quality systems. As a result, the first dataset with morpho-syntactic and NE annotations has been released for benchmarking NER systems. At VLSP 2018, the NER shared task has been organized for the second time, providing a bigger dataset containing texts from various domains, but without morpho-syntactic annotation. These resources are available for research purpose via the VLSP website vlsp.org.vn/resources. In this paper, we describe the datasets as well as the evaluation results obtained from these two campaigns.

Dependency Grammar

Dependency grammar is a descriptive and theoretical tradition in linguistics that can be traced back to antiquity. It has long been influential in the European linguistics tradition and has more recently become a mainstream approach to representing syntactic and semantic structure in natural language processing. In this review, we introduce the basic theoretical assumptions of dependency grammar and review some key aspects in which different dependency frameworks agree or disagree. We also discuss advantages and disadvantages of dependency representations and introduce Universal Dependencies, a framework for multilingual dependency-based morphosyntactic annotation that has been applied to more than 60 languages.

V iskanju slovarsko relevantne kolokacije na primeru struktur s prislovi

V leksikogramatični raziskavi so predstavljeni rezultati analiz struktur s prislovi, ki so bile izvedene v okviru temeljnega raziskovalnega projekta Kolokacije kot temelj jezikovnega opisa: semantični in časovni vidiki (KOLOS; J6-8255). Na podlagi rezultatov predhodno izvedene pilotne množičenjske naloge, v kateri so označevalci jezikoslovci ocenjevali avtomatsko izluščene kolokacijske kandidate iz korpusa Gigafida in se opredeljevali do tega, kaj je in kaj ni slovarsko relevantna kolokacija, smo analizirali vse kolokacijsko produktivne strukture s prislovi. Namen analiziranja je bil opredeliti kolokacijo kot semantično relevantno sopojavitev dveh (ali več) besed ter s tem tudi razliko med slovarsko relevantnimi kolokacijami in statistično prepoznanimi oz. šibkejšimi kolokacijami, ki ne opravljajo semantične funkcije in so posledično nerelevantne za kolokacijski slovar.
 Analize struktur s prislovi so pokazale, da se je o semantični relevantnosti in slovarski vključenosti pri posameznih primerih kolokacijskih kandidatov ali tipih kolokatorjev treba odločati na ravni posamezne strukture. Tovrstni primer so prislovi, ki lahko nastopajo v vlogi intenzifikatorja (tip kar pošteno [načeti]) ali pa semantično manj relevantni vlogi poudarnosti oz. členkovnosti (tip kar prekiniti). Podobne jezikoslovne obravnave so potrebne širše skupine števniškosti, kot je kratnost ali zaporedje (zaporednostni prislovi), ki jih zaradi raznolike semantične relevantnosti ne moremo strukturno omejiti (četrtič doktorirati proti stokrat povedati).
 Podatki, pridobljeni na podlagi opravljenih analiz, bodo omogočali podrobnejše ali nadaljnje analize, predvsem pa celovit opis vsake kolokacijske strukture in njene kolokativnosti. Na podlagi identificiranih napak zaradi avtomatskega označevanja strukture pa bo mogoče nadgraditi obstoječe vzorce za luščenje in predvsem izboljšati avtomatsko luščenje za problematične strukture. Podatki bodo zelo uporabni tudi pri nadaljnjem vključevanju in obravnavi novih struktur, prvotno izločenih zaradi precejšnjega šuma. Vse ugotovitve bo mogoče implementirati v leksikografski delotok in na ta način izboljšati podatke (stopenjskost gesel) v slovarju. Učno množico s 17.576 kandidati bo mogoče uporabiti tudi v drugih dejavnostih projekta KOLOS: za uvrščanje kolokatorjev v gruče, primerjavo sopomenk s kolokacijami in nenazadnje za proučevanje kolokacijskih trendov skozi čas.

Predication Transformation: A parallel corpus-based study of Russian verbless sentences and their English translations

<p class="Default">Artykuł przedstawia opartą na korpusie, kontrastywną analizę predykacji związanej z tłuma­czeniem zdań bezczasownikowych z języka rosyjskiego na język angielski w oparciu o pilotażowy paralelny korpus składający się z opartego na dialogach języka rosyjskiego <em>Braci Karamazow </em>Fiodora Dostojewskiego (1880) i angielskiego tłumaczenia Peveara i Volokhonsky <em>The Brothers Karamazov </em>(1990). W przeciwieństwie do angielskiego, znanego z zależności od frazy werbalnej z osobową formą czasownika, rosyjski pozwala na użycie zdań bezczasownikowych bardziej pro­duktywnie niż jakikolwiek inny język indoeuropejski (McShane, 2000; Kopotev, 2007). Łącząc założenia tekstu paralelnego w odniesieniu do językoznawstwa kontrastywnego opracowane przez Guillemin-Flescher (2003) z nową metodą automatycznej ekstrakcji zdań bezczasownikowych, niniejsze studium bada powtarzające się wzorce dotyczące sposobu, w jaki struktury językowe zyskują lub tracą wartość predykacji w tłumaczeniu. Po automatycznej segmentacji, morfosyn­taktycznej adnotacji i ekstrakcji zdania bezczasownikowych i ich tłumaczeniowe odpowiedniki są ręcznie przypisywane do typu predykacji werbalnej i niewerbalnej zgodnie z definicjami Hen­gevelda (1992). Wyniki przedstawiają typologię zjawiska zwanego “transformacją predykacyjną”, w której odpowiedniki translacyjne są efektem transformacji ze względu na typ predykacyjny. Wyniki ilościowe ukazują, w jakim stopniu czasowniki są wykorzystywane w tłumaczeniu zdań bezczasownikowych z języka rosyjskiego na język angielski, a także są wskaźnikiem werbalizacji predykatów. Twierdzimy, że powiązane z czasownikiem pojęcie semantycznej predykacji nie jest stabilne międzyjęzykowo.</p>

Georgian Dialect Corpus: Linguistic and Encyclopedic Information in Online Dictionaries

Abstract The Georgian Dialect Corpus (GDC) has been created within the framework of the project “Linguistic Portrait of Georgia”. It was the first attempt to create a structured corpus of Georgian dialects. The work of this project includes building the technical framework for a corpus, collecting the corpus (text) data of Georgian dialects including the lexicographic data (dictionaries), their linguistic processing, digitizing, developing annotation framework, making decision on the morphosyntactic annotation. Currently, the Georgian Dialect Corpus is a platform consisting of the dialect corpus, the text library, the lexicographical database/online dialect dictionaries. For the purposes of developing the lexicographical database and dialect dictionaries, we have created a new program – the Lexicographic Editor. It allows us to structure and improve the dictionaries with multiple linguistic and lexicographic information. The lexicographic concept of the GDC has been developed taking into consideration linguistic and social features of the Georgian dialects.

I corpora diacronici delle lingue romanze

This paper presents a survey of the diachroniccorporaavailable online for the study of the Romance languages. In the first place the makeup of eachcorpusis described, indicating the number of texts and tokens included and the manner of classification of the documents following chronological, typological and diatopic criteria. After having examined the problems involved in lemmatization and morphosyntactic annotation, the paper will look at query options with a view to possible research into lexicon, morphology, syntax and semantics. A short conclusion will consist in the presentation of the MIDIAcorpus, published in June 2014, which represents the first tool devised for the study of Italian from a lengthy diachronic perspective (from the earliest texts to the mid-twentieth century).

Developing free morphological data for Polish

Developing free morphological data for PolishA limiting factor in construction of Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems is often the availability of morphological resources. This indeed happens for Polish: the freely available corpus with manual morpho-syntactic annotation (part of the IPI PAN Corpus) is not coupled with any free morphological analyser. There exists a very large morphological dictionary of Polish available under a free licence – Morfologik. Unfortunately, its tagset differs significantly from the tagset of the corpus and, what is more, its morphological description lacks desired rigour. We amend this situation by performing a massive conversion of the dictionary into the tagset compliant with the corpus. The conversion results in a free dictionary containing entries for almost 3.5 million different word forms. In this article we report on our methodology, discuss some morphological and syntactic issues related to both tagsets and present the characteristics of the resulting dictionary.

Application of multilingual corpus in contrastive studies (on the example of the Bulgarian-Polish-Lithuanian parallel corpus)

Application of multilingual corpus in contrastive studies (on the example of the Bulgarian-Polish-Lithuanian parallel corpus)In this paper we present applications of a trilingual corpus in language research. Comparative and contrastive studies of Polish and Bulgarian as well as Polish and Lithuanian have been already conducted, but up to the best of our knowledge no such studies exist for Bulgarian and Lithuanian. On the one hand, it is interesting to note that two Slavic languages are compared to a Baltic language (Lithuanian). On the other hand, the three languages are marginally present in the EU because of the later ascension of the three countries to the EU. The paper shortly describes the first electronic Bulgarian–Polish–Lithuanian experimental corpus, currently under development only for research. We also focus our attention on the morphosyntactic annotation of the parallel trilingual corpus according to the Corpus Encoding Standard: we present a review of the Part-of-Speech (POS) classification of the participle in the three languages – Bulgarian, Polish, and Lithuanian in comparison to another POS, the adjective. We briefly discuss tagsets for corpus annotation from the point of view of possible unification in the future with some examples.

<tiger2/>: serialising the ISO SynAF syntactic object model

This paper introduces , an XML format developed to serialise the object model defined by the ISO Syntactic Annotation Framework SynAF. Based on widespread best practices we adapt a popular XML format for syntactic annotation, TigerXML, with additional features to support a variety of syntactic phenomena including constituent and dependency structures, binding, and different node types such as compounds or empty elements. We also define interfaces to other formats and standards including the Morpho-syntactic Annotation Framework MAF and the ISOCat Data Category Registry. Finally a case study of the German Treebank TueBa-D/Z is presented, showcasing the handling of constituent structures, topological fields and coreference annotation in tandem.

Bulgarian-English Treebank

The paper describes the construction of a Bulgarian-English treebank aligned on the word and semantic level. We consider the manual word level alignment easier and more reliable than the manual alignment on syntactic and semantic level. Thus, after manual word level alignment we apply an automatic procedure for the construction of semantic level alignments. Our work presents the main steps of this automatic procedure which exploits the syntactic analysis of both sentences, morphosyntactic annotation, manual word level alignment in producing the semantic annotation of the sentences and semantic alignment. Last, but not least, a method for identification of potential errors is discussed using the automatically constructed semantic analyses of Bulgarian sentences and their comparison to the semantic representation of the English sentences.

Lexical association measures and collocation extraction

We present an extensive empirical evaluation of collocation extraction methods based on lexical association measures and their combination. The experiments are performed on three sets of collocation candidates extracted from the Prague Dependency Treebank with manual morphosyntactic annotation and from the Czech National Corpus with automatically assigned lemmas and part-of-speech tags. The collocation candidates were manually labeled as collocational or non-collocational. The evaluation is based on measuring the quality of ranking the candidates according to their chance to form collocations. Performance of the methods is compared by precision-recall curves and mean average precision scores. The work is focused on two-word (bigram) collocations only. We experiment with bigrams extracted from sentence dependency structure as well as from surface word order. Further, we study the effect of corpus size on the performance of the individual methods and their combination.