Courses at the 1st UniDive training school

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Dependency syntax, Surface-Syntactic UD, and UD

Trainers

Sylvain Kahane (Université Paris Nanterre and Institut Universitaire de France)

Objectives:

Recall the principles of dependency syntax (already done in Naples but necessary to start)

Connectedness: words that form a unit must be connecte

Headedness: the distribution of a unit is generally controlled by one word

Categories: words must be assigned the same category if and only if they can occupy the same positions

Relations: similar constructions with similar properties must be labeled with same syntactic relation

SUD annotation scheme

Conversion between SUD and UD

A word on mSUD, SUD annotation at the morph level for people starting with Interlinear Glossed Texts

Exercises:

understanding the SUD (and UD) annotation scheme by exploring some treebanks with Grew-match (SUD_English, converted from UD; SUD_Naija, a native SUD treebank of a pidgincreole of English; mSUD_Beja, a native morph-based SUD treebank glossed in English) (joint session with Bruno Guillaume?)

example of a SUD annotation from scratch based on data from the participants which are glossed and translated in English

creation of a project on ArboratorGrew

annotation on ArboratorGrew

automatic completion of the annotation with Grew

Pre-requisites:

being concerned by syntactic annotation

ideally, having some data you want to annotate (please take contact before the summer school for the preparation of the data)

Preparatory work (offered in a parallel course by Bruno Guillaume):

looking at treebanks on Grew-Match

comparing UD and SUD annotation

Further readings:

Lucien Tesnière (2015), Elements of structural syntax, Benjamins. ebook in open access.

Igor Mel’cuk (1988), Dependency syntax: theory and practice. SUNY press.

Timothy Osborne (2019), A Dependency Grammar of English. Benjamins.

Sylvain Kahane, 2003, The Meaning-Text Theory, in Dependency and Valency, Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Sciences, 25 : 1-2, Berlin/NY: De Gruyter, 32 p.

De Marneffe, M. C., Manning, C. D., Nivre, J., & Zeman, D. (2021). Universal dependencies. Computational linguistics, 47(2), 255-308.

Gerdes K., Guillaume B., Kahane S., Perrier G. (2018) SUD or Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies: An annotation scheme near-isomorphic to UD, Proceedings of the Universal Dependencies Workshop (UDW), EMNLP.

Gerdes K., Guillaume B., Kahane S, Perrier G. (2021) Starting a new treebank? Go SUD!, Proceedings of 6th international conference on Dependency Linguistics (DepLing), SyntaxFest, ACL.

Annotation of multiword expressions for newcomers

Trainers

Verginica Mititelu (Romanian Academy, Bucarest, Romania)

Voula Giouli (ATHENA Research Centre, Athens and Aristotle University of Tessaloniki, Greece)

Objectives: Upon completion of the course, the trainees will be able to

define the notion of multiword expressions and manually identify them in corpora;

classify the multiword expressions identified in corpora according to the types defined for them in PARSEME and UniDive;

briefly describe this phenomenon in their language

Form of instruction

lectures

practical exercises - annotating the corpus prepared by the trainees

the last session will give the trainees the opportunity to present their observations from the practical exercise

Contents

The course will start from the definition and characteristics of multiword expressions as agreed upon in PARSEME and UniDive, telling them apart from other phenomena involving word combinations. Results already obtained in PARSEME and beyond will also be presented, highlighting the importance of corpora annotation for tasks of automatic identification of the phenomenon in corpora and for lexicography.

The decision trees for establishing the status of multiword expressions of several types (verbal, nominal, modifier) will be presented, with examples from languages (preferably from different language families and types).

Having access to this knowledge, the trainees will then be involved in a practical session, in which they will annotate a corpus of their own language with the types of multiword expressions presented in the theoretical part of the course.

Insights from the annotation will be presented by the trainees and will be recorded so as to be further taken into account as feedback for the annotation guidelines.

Pre-requisites

theoretical linguistics knowledge (parts of speech, inflection, syntactic structures)

Timothy Baldwin and Su Nam Kim. 2010. Multiword expressions. In Nitin Indurkhya and Fred J. Damerau, editors, Handbook of Natural Language Processing, 2 edition, pages 267–292. CRC Press, Taylor and Francis Group, Boca Raton, FL, USA.

Preparatory work: To be done by the trainees before the training school:

prepare a parallel corpus or a monolingual one; it would preferably contain a new language, a new dialect, or a new genre; by “new” we mean “not already covered in the PARSEME 1.3 corpus”.

Corpus annotation infrastructure

Trainers

Bruno Guillaume (INRIA, LORIA, France)

Daniel Zeman (Charles University, Czech Republic)

Agata Savary (Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS, LISN, France)

Objectives:

Understand and efficiently use the technical infrastructure supporting UD and PARSEME corpus annotation and query

Form of instruction

mostly practical exercises in corpus querying and processing

Contents

Session 1 (by Daniel Zeman & Agata Savary & Bruno Guillaume): Git infrastructure

Git for beginners

UD GitHub repositories

PARSEME Gitlab repositories

Github synchronisation in Grew“

Session 2 (by Bruno Guillaume jointly with Sylvain's course on dependency syntax): Basics of treebank querying and annotation

Corpus queries with Grew-Match

UD vs. SUD

Corpus annotation with Arborator Grew

Session 3 (by Daniel Zeman & Agata Savary): Corpus format validation

File formats (CoNLL-U, CUPT)

CoNLL-U validator

PARSEME validator

UD/PARSEME consistency

Session 4 (by Bruno Guillaume): Advanced treebank querying and annotation

querrying PARSEME data

corpus pre-annotation

Session 5 (by Daniel Zeman & Bruno Guillaume): Corpus quality

error mining and correcting with Grew-match

fixing errors in text editors

Session 6 (by Daniel Zeman & Agata Savary): Documentation and discussion on Git

Documenting a corpus in README

UD Github issues

PARSEME Gitlab issues

Recommended readings

Git manual

PARSEME corpus wiki