Mischievous Nominal Constructions in Universal Dependencies
This work tackles annotation inconsistencies in UD for linguists and NLP practitioners, but it is incremental as it focuses on specific nominal cases.
The paper addresses inconsistencies in Universal Dependencies (UD) for 'mischievous' nominal phenomena in English, proposing solutions to standardize their treatment.
While the highly multilingual Universal Dependencies (UD) project provides extensive guidelines for clausal structure as well as structure within canonical nominal phrases, a standard treatment is lacking for many "mischievous" nominal phenomena that break the mold. As a result, numerous inconsistencies within and across corpora can be found, even in languages with extensive UD treebanking work, such as English. This paper surveys the kinds of mischievous nominal expressions attested in English UD corpora and proposes solutions primarily with English in mind, but which may offer paths to solutions for a variety of UD languages.