3.0CLMay 20
Quantifying the cross-linguistic effects of syncretism on agreement attractionUtku Turk, Eva Neu
Agreement attraction errors, in which a verb erroneously agrees with an intervening noun rather than its grammatical head, are amplified by morphological syncretism in some languages (English, German, Russian) but not others (Turkish, Armenian), a cross-linguistic pattern without a principled account. We use surprisal and attention entropy from large language models as processing proxies to investigate this variation across four languages. LLM-derived measures replicate behavioral findings in English and German (syncretism modulates attraction), align with Turkish null results (no modulation), and partially capture Russian patterns. We discuss further directions for better understanding why syncretism affects agreement attraction differently across languages.
Resources for Turkish Dependency Parsing: Introducing the BOUN Treebank and the BoAT Annotation ToolUtku Türk, Furkan Atmaca, Şaziye Betül Özateş et al.
In this paper, we introduce the resources that we developed for Turkish dependency parsing, which include a novel manually annotated treebank (BOUN Treebank), along with the guidelines we adopted, and a new annotation tool (BoAT). The manual annotation process we employed was shaped and implemented by a team of four linguists and five Natural Language Processing (NLP) specialists. Decisions regarding the annotation of the BOUN Treebank were made in line with the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework as well as our recent efforts for unifying the Turkish UD treebanks through manual re-annotation. To the best of our knowledge, BOUN Treebank is the largest Turkish treebank. It contains a total of 9,761 sentences from various topics including biographical texts, national newspapers, instructional texts, popular culture articles, and essays. In addition, we report the parsing results of a state-of-the-art dependency parser obtained over the BOUN Treebank as well as two other treebanks in Turkish. Our results demonstrate that the unification of the Turkish annotation scheme and the introduction of a more comprehensive treebank lead to improved performance with regard to dependency parsing.