Treebanking user-generated content: a UD based overview of guidelines, corpora and unified recommendations

Sanguinetti Manuela

;Bosco Cristina;Cassidy Lauren;Çetinoğlu Özlem;Cignarella Alessandra Teresa;Lynn Teresa;Rehbein Ines;Ruppenhofer Josef;Seddah Djamé;Zeldes Amir

2023-01-01

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Abstract

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.