Treebanking User-Generated Content: a UD Based Overview of Guidelines, Corpora and Unified Recommendations
This work addresses the problem of inconsistent annotation for researchers developing treebanks for user-generated content, but it is incremental as it builds on existing UD principles.
The paper tackles the inconsistent syntactic annotation of user-generated content in treebanks by providing an overview of existing corpora and proposing unified guidelines within the Universal Dependencies framework to promote cross-linguistic consistency.
This article presents a discussion on the main linguistic phenomena which cause difficulties in the analysis of user-generated texts found on the web and in social media, and proposes a set of annotation guidelines for their treatment within the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework of syntactic analysis. Given on the one hand the increasing number of treebanks featuring user-generated content, and its somewhat inconsistent treatment in these resources on the other, the aim of this article is twofold: (1) to provide a condensed, though comprehensive, overview of such treebanks -- based on available literature -- along with their main features and a comparative analysis of their annotation criteria, and (2) to propose a set of tentative UD-based annotation guidelines, to promote consistent treatment of the particular phenomena found in these types of texts. The overarching goal of this article is to provide a common framework for researchers interested in developing similar resources in UD, thus promoting cross-linguistic consistency, which is a principle that has always been central to the spirit of UD.