Marrying Universal Dependencies and Universal Morphology

Abstract: The Universal Dependencies (UD) and Universal Morphology (UniMorph) projects each present schemata for annotating the morphosyntactic details of language. Each project also provides corpora of annotated text in many languages - UD at the token level and UniMorph at the type level. As each corpus is built by different annotators, language-specific decisions hinder the goal of universal schemata. With compatibility of tags, each project's annotations could be used to validate the other's. Additionally, the availability of both type- and token-level resources would be a boon to tasks such as parsing and homograph disambiguation. To ease this interoperability, we present a deterministic mapping from Universal Dependencies v2 features into the UniMorph schema. We validate our approach by lookup in the UniMorph corpora and find a macro-average of 64.13% recall. We also note incompatibilities due to paucity of data on either side. Finally, we present a critical evaluation of the foundations, strengths, and weaknesses of the two annotation projects.

The two largest standardized, cross-lingual datasets for morphological annotation are provided by the Universal Dependencies BIBREF1 and Universal Morphology BIBREF2 , BIBREF3 projects. Each project's data are annotated according to its own cross-lingual schema, prescribing how features like gender or case should be marked. The schemata capture largely similar information, so one may want to leverage both UD's token-level treebanks and UniMorph's type-level lookup tables and unify the two resources. This would permit a leveraging of both the token-level UD treebanks and the type-level UniMorph tables of paradigms. Unfortunately, neither resource perfectly realizes its schema. On a dataset-by-dataset basis, they incorporate annotator errors, omissions, and human decisions when the schemata are underspecified; one such example is in fig:disagreement.
A dataset-by-dataset problem demands a dataset-by-dataset solution; our task is not to translate a schema, but to translate a resource. Starting from the idealized schema, we create a rule-based tool for converting UD-schema annotations to UniMorph annotations, incorporating language-specific post-edits that both correct infelicities and also increase harmony between the datasets themselves (rather than the schemata). We apply this conversion to the 31 languages with both UD and UniMorph data, and we report our method's recall, showing an improvement over the strategy which just maps corresponding schematic features to each other. Further, we show similar downstream performance for each annotation scheme in the task of morphological tagging.
This tool enables a synergistic use of UniMorph and Universal Dependencies, as well as teasing out the annotation discrepancies within and across projects. When one dataset disobeys its schema or disagrees with a related language, the flaws may not be noticed except by such a methodological dive into the resources. When the maintainers of the resources ameliorate these flaws, the resources move closer to the goal of a universal, cross-lingual inventory of features for morphological annotation.
The contributions of this work are:
Morphological inflection is the act of altering the base form of a word (the lemma, represented in fixed-width type) to encode morphosyntactic features. As an example from English, prove takes on the form proved to indicate that the action occurred in the past. (We will represent all surface forms in quotation marks.) The process occurs in the majority of the world's widely-spoken languages, typically through meaningful affixes. The breadth of forms created by inflection creates a challenge of data sparsity for natural language processing: The likelihood of observing a particular word form diminishes.
A classic result in psycholinguistics BIBREF4 shows that inflectional morphology is a fully productive process. Indeed, it cannot be that humans simply have the equivalent of a lookup table, where they store the inflected forms for retrieval as the syntactic context requires. Instead, there needs to be a mental process that can generate properly inflected words on demand. BIBREF4 showed this insightfully through the wug-test, an experiment where she forced participants to correctly inflect out-of-vocabulary lemmata, such as the novel noun wug.
Certain features of a word do not vary depending on its context: In German or Spanish where nouns are gendered, the word for onion will always be grammatically feminine. Thus, to prepare for later discussion, we divide the morphological features of a word into two categories: the modifiable inflectional features and the fixed lexical features.
A part of speech (POS) is a coarse syntactic category (like verb) that begets a word's particular menu of lexical and inflectional features. In English, verbs express no gender, and adjectives do not reflect person or number. The part of speech dictates a set of inflectional slots to be filled by the surface forms. Completing these slots for a given lemma and part of speech gives a paradigm: a mapping from slots to surface forms. Regular English verbs have five slots in their paradigm BIBREF5 , which we illustrate for the verb prove, using simple labels for the forms in tab:ptb.
A morphosyntactic schema prescribes how language can be annotated—giving stricter categories than our simple labels for prove—and can vary in the level of detail provided. Part of speech tags are an example of a very coarse schema, ignoring details of person, gender, and number. A slightly finer-grained schema for English is the Penn Treebank tagset BIBREF6 , which includes signals for English morphology. For instance, its VBZ tag pertains to the specially inflected 3rd-person singular, present-tense verb form (e.g. proves in tab:ptb).
If the tag in a schema is detailed enough that it exactly specifies a slot in a paradigm, it is called a morphosyntactic description (MSD). These descriptions require varying amounts of detail: While the English verbal paradigm is small enough to fit on a page, the verbal paradigm of the Northeast Caucasian language Archi can have over 1500000 slots BIBREF7 .
Unlike the Penn Treebank tags, the UD and UniMorph schemata are cross-lingual and include a fuller lexicon of attribute-value pairs, such as Person: 1. Each was built according to a different set of principles. UD's schema is constructed bottom-up, adapting to include new features when they're identified in languages. UniMorph, conversely, is top-down: A cross-lingual survey of the literature of morphological phenomena guided its design. UniMorph aims to be linguistically complete, containing all known morphosyntactic attributes. Both schemata share one long-term goal: a total inventory for annotating the possible morphosyntactic features of a word.
The Universal Dependencies morphological schema comprises part of speech and 23 additional attributes (also called features in UD) annotating meaning or syntax, as well as language-specific attributes. In order to ensure consistent annotation, attributes are included into the general UD schema if they occur in several corpora. Language-specific attributes are used when only one corpus annotates for a specific feature.
The UD schema seeks to balance language-specific and cross-lingual concerns. It annotates for both inflectional features such as case and lexical features such as gender. Additionally, the UD schema annotates for features which can be interpreted as derivational in some languages. For example, the Czech UD guidance uses a Coll value for the Number feature to denote mass nouns (for example, "lidstvo" "humankind" from the root "lid" "people").
UD represents a confederation of datasets BIBREF8 annotated with dependency relationships (which are not the focus of this work) and morphosyntactic descriptions. Each dataset is an annotated treebank, making it a resource of token-level annotations. The schema is guided by these treebanks, with feature names chosen for relevance to native speakers. (In sec:unimorph, we will contrast this with UniMorph's treatment of morphosyntactic categories.) The UD datasets have been used in the CoNLL shared tasks BIBREF9 .
In the Universal Morphological Feature Schema BIBREF10 , there are at least 212 values, spread across 23 attributes. It identifies some attributes that UD excludes like information structure and deixis, as well as providing more values for certain attributes, like 23 different noun classes endemic to Bantu languages. As it is a schema for marking morphology, its part of speech attribute does not have POS values for punctuation, symbols, or miscellany (Punct, Sym, and X in Universal Dependencies).
Like the UD schema, the decomposition of a word into its lemma and MSD is directly comparable across languages. Its features are informed by a distinction between universal categories, which are widespread and psychologically real to speakers; and comparative concepts, only used by linguistic typologists to compare languages BIBREF11 . Additionally, it strives for identity of meaning across languages, not simply similarity of terminology. As a prime example, it does not regularly label a dative case for nouns, for reasons explained in depth by BIBREF11 .
The UniMorph resources for a language contain complete paradigms extracted from Wiktionary BIBREF12 , BIBREF13 . Word types are annotated to form a database, mapping a lemma–tag pair to a surface form. The schema is explained in detail in BIBREF10 . It has been used in the SIGMORPHON shared task BIBREF14 and the CoNLL–SIGMORPHON shared tasks BIBREF15 , BIBREF16 . Several components of the UniMorph schema have been adopted by UD.
While the two schemata annotate different features, their annotations often look largely similar. Consider the attested annotation of the Spanish word mandaba (I/he/she/it) commanded. tab:annotations shows that these annotations share many attributes.
Some conversions are straightforward: VERB to V, Mood=Ind to IND, Number=Sing to SG, and Person=3 to 3. One might also suggest mapping Tense=Imp to IPFV, though this crosses semantic categories: IPFV represents the imperfective aspect, whereas Tense=Imp comes from imperfect, the English name often given to Spanish's pasado continuo form. The imperfect is a verb form which combines both past tense and imperfective aspect. UniMorph chooses to split this into the atoms PST and IPFV, while UD unifies them according to the familiar name of the tense.
Prima facie, the alignment task may seem trivial. But we've yet to explore the humans in the loop. This conversion is a hard problem because we're operating on idealized schemata. We're actually annotating human decisions—and human mistakes. If both schemata were perfectly applied, their overlapping attributes could be mapped to each other simply, in a cross-lingual and totally general way. Unfortunately, the resources are imperfect realizations of their schemata. The cross-lingual, cross-resource, and within-resource problems that we'll note mean that we need a tailor-made solution for each language.
Showcasing their schemata, the Universal Dependencies and UniMorph projects each present large, annotated datasets. UD's v2.1 release BIBREF1 has 102 treebanks in 60 languages. The large resource, constructed by independent parties, evinces problems in the goal of a universal inventory of annotations. Annotators may choose to omit certain values (like the coerced gender of refrescante in fig:disagreement), and they may disagree on how a linguistic concept is encoded. (See, e.g., BIBREF11 's ( BIBREF11 ) description of the dative case.) Additionally, many of the treebanks were created by fully- or semi-automatic conversion from treebanks with less comprehensive annotation schemata than UD BIBREF0 . For instance, the Spanish word vas you go is incorrectly labeled Gender: Fem|Number: Pl because it ends in a character sequence which is common among feminine plural nouns. (Nevertheless, the part of speech field for vas is correct.)
UniMorph's development is more centralized and pipelined. Inflectional paradigms are scraped from Wiktionary, annotators map positions in the scraped data to MSDs, and the mapping is automatically applied to all of the scraped paradigms. Because annotators handle languages they are familiar with (or related ones), realization of the schema is also done on a language-by-language basis. Further, the scraping process does not capture lexical aspects that are not inflected, like noun gender in many languages. The schema permits inclusion of these details; their absence is an artifact of the data collection process. Finally, UniMorph records only exist for nouns, verbs, and adjectives, though the schema is broader than these categories.
For these reasons, we treat the corpora as imperfect realizations of the schemata. Moreover, we contend that ambiguity in the schemata leave the door open to allow for such imperfections. With no strict guidance, it's natural that annotators would take different paths. Nevertheless, modulo annotator disagreement, we assume that within a particular corpus, one word form will always be consistently annotated.
Three categories of annotation difficulty are missing values, language-specific attributes, and multiword expressions.
In our work, the goal is not simply to translate one schema into the other, but to translate one resource (the imperfect manifestation of the schema) to match the other. The differences between the schemata and discrepancies in annotation mean that the transformation of annotations from one schema to the other is not straightforward.
Two naive options for the conversion are a lookup table of MSDs and a lookup table of the individual attribute-value pairs which comprise the MSDs. The former is untenable: the table of all UD feature combinations (including null features, excluding language-specific attributes) would have 2.445e17 entries. Of course, most combinations won't exist, but this gives a sense of the table's scale. Also, it doesn't leverage the factorial nature of the annotations: constructing the table would require a massive duplication of effort. On the other hand, attribute-value lookup lacks the flexibility to show how a pair of values interacts. Neither approach would handle language- and annotator-specific tendencies in the corpora.
Our approach to converting UD MSDs to UniMorph MSDs begins with the attribute-value lookup, then amends it on a language-specific basis. Alterations informed by the MSD and the word form, like insertion, substitution, and deletion, increase the number of agreeing annotations. They are critical for work that examines the MSD monolithically instead of feature-by-feature BIBREF25 , BIBREF26 : Without exact matches, converting the individual tags becomes hollow.
Beginning our process, we relied on documentation of the two schemata to create our initial, language-agnostic mapping of individual values. This mapping has 140 pairs in it. Because the mapping was derived purely from the schemata, it is a useful approximation of how well the schemata match up. We note, however, that the mapping does not handle idiosyncrasies like the many uses of dative or features which are represented in UniMorph by argument templates: possession and ergative–absolutive argument marking. The initial step of our conversion is using this mapping to populate a proposed UniMorph MSD.
As shown in sec:results, the initial proposal is often frustratingly deficient. Thus we introduce the post-edits. To concoct these, we looked into UniMorph corpora for these languages, compared these to the conversion outputs, and then sought to bring the conversion outputs closer to the annotations in the actual UniMorph corpora. When a form and its lemma existed in both corpora, we could directly inspect how the annotations differed. Our process of iteratively refining the conversion implies a table which exactly maps any combination of UD MSD and its related values (lemma, form, etc.) to a UniMorph MSD, though we do not store the table explicitly.
Some conversion rules we've created must be applied before or after others. These sequential dependencies provide conciseness. Our post-editing procedure operates on the initial MSD hypothesis as follows:
We evaluate our tool on two tasks:
To be clear, our scope is limited to the schema conversion. Future work will explore NLP tasks that exploit both the created token-level UniMorph data and the existing type-level UniMorph data.
We transform all UD data to the UniMorph. We compare the simple lookup-based transformation to the one with linguistically informed post-edits on all languages with both UD and UniMorph data. We then evaluate the recall of MSDs without partial credit.
Because the UniMorph tables only possess annotations for verbs, nouns, adjectives, or some combination, we can only examine performance for these parts of speech. We consider two words to be a match if their form and lemma are present in both resources. Syncretism allows a single surface form to realize multiple MSDs (Spanish mandaba can be first- or third-person), so we define success as the computed MSD matching any of the word's UniMorph MSDs. This gives rise to an equation for recall: of the word–lemma pairs found in both resources, how many of their UniMorph-converted MSDs are present in the UniMorph tables?
Our problem here is not a learning problem, so the question is ill-posed. There is no training set, and the two resources for a given language make up a test set. The quality of our model—the conversion tool—comes from how well we encode prior knowledge about the relationship between the UD and UniMorph corpora.
If the UniMorph-converted treebanks perform differently on downstream tasks, then they convey different information. This signals a failure of the conversion process. As a downstream task, we choose morphological tagging, a critical step to leveraging morphological information on new text.
We evaluate taggers trained on the transformed UD data, choosing eight languages randomly from the intersection of UD and UniMorph resources. We report the macro-averaged F1 score of attribute-value pairs on a held-out test set, with official train/validation/test splits provided in the UD treebanks. As a reference point, we also report tagging accuracy on those languages' untransformed data.
We use the state-of-the-art morphological tagger of BIBREF0 . It is a factored conditional random field with potentials for each attribute, attribute pair, and attribute transition. The potentials are computed by neural networks, predicting the values of each attribute jointly but not monolithically. Inference with the potentials is performed approximately by loopy belief propagation. We use the authors' hyperparameters.
We note a minor implementation detail for the sake of reproducibility. The tagger exploits explicit guidance about the attribute each value pertains to. The UniMorph schema's values are globally unique, but their attributes are not explicit. For example, the UniMorph Masc denotes a masculine gender. We amend the code of BIBREF0 to incorporate attribute identifiers for each UniMorph value.
We present the intrinsic task's recall scores in tab:recall. Bear in mind that due to annotation errors in the original corpora (like the vas example from sec:resources), the optimal score is not always $100\%$ . Some shortcomings of recall come from irremediable annotation discrepancies. Largely, we are hamstrung by differences in choice of attributes to annotate. When one resource marks gender and the other marks case, we can't infer the gender of the word purely from its surface form. The resources themselves would need updating to encode the relevant morphosyntactic information. Some languages had a very low number of overlapping forms, and no tag matches or near-matches between them: Arabic, Hindi, Lithuanian, Persian, and Russian. A full list of observed, irremediable discrepancies is presented alongside the codebase.
There are three other transformations for which we note no improvement here. Because of the problem in Basque argument encoding in the UniMorph dataset—which only contains verbs—we note no improvement in recall on Basque. Irish also does not improve: UD marks gender on nouns, while UniMorph marks case. Adjectives in UD are also underspecified. The verbs, though, are already correct with the simple mapping. Finally, with Dutch, the UD annotations are impoverished compared to the UniMorph annotations, and missing attributes cannot be inferred without external knowledge.
For the extrinsic task, the performance is reasonably similar whether UniMorph or UD; see tab:tagging. A large fluctuation would suggest that the two annotations encode distinct information. On the contrary, the similarities suggest that the UniMorph-mapped MSDs have similar content. We recognize that in every case, tagging F1 increased—albeit by amounts as small as $0.16$ points. This is in part due to the information that is lost in the conversion. UniMorph's schema does not indicate the type of pronoun (demonstrative, interrogative, etc.), and when lexical information is not recorded in UniMorph, we delete it from the MSD during transformation. On the other hand, UniMorph's atomic tags have more parts to guess, but they are often related. (E.g. Ipfv always entails Pst in Spanish.) Altogether, these forces seem to have little impact on tagging performance.
The goal of a tagset-to-tagset mapping of morphological annotations is shared by the Interset project BIBREF28 . Interset decodes features in the source corpus to a tag interlingua, then encodes that into target corpus features. (The idea of an interlingua is drawn from machine translation, where a prevailing early mindset was to convert to a universal representation, then encode that representation's semantics in the target language. Our approach, by contrast, is a direct flight from the source to the target.) Because UniMorph corpora are noisy, the encoding from the interlingua would have to be rewritten for each target. Further, decoding the UD MSD into the interlingua cannot leverage external information like the lemma and form.
The creators of HamleDT sought to harmonize dependency annotations among treebanks, similar to our goal of harmonizing across resources BIBREF29 . The treebanks they sought to harmonize used multiple diverse annotation schemes, which the authors unified under a single scheme.
 BIBREF30 present mappings into a coarse, universal part of speech for 22 languages. Working with POS tags rather than morphological tags (which have far more dimensions), their space of options to harmonize is much smaller than ours.
Our extrinsic evaluation is most in line with the paradigm of BIBREF31 (and similar work therein), who compare syntactic parser performance on UD treebanks annotated with two styles of dependency representation. Our problem differs, though, in that the dependency representations express different relationships, while our two schemata vastly overlap. As our conversion is lossy, we do not appraise the learnability of representations as they did.
In addition to using the number of extra rules as a proxy for harmony between resources, one could perform cross-lingual projection of morphological tags BIBREF32 , BIBREF33 . Our approach succeeds even without parallel corpora.
We created a tool for annotating Universal Dependencies CoNLL-U files with UniMorph annotations. Our tool is ready to use off-the-shelf today, requires no training, and is deterministic. While under-specification necessitates a lossy and imperfect conversion, ours is interpretable. Patterns of mistakes can be identified and ameliorated.
The tool allows a bridge between resources annotated in the Universal Dependencies and Universal Morphology (UniMorph) schemata. As the Universal Dependencies project provides a set of treebanks with token-level annotation, while the UniMorph project releases type-level annotated tables, the newfound compatibility opens up new experiments. A prime example of exploiting token- and type-level data is BIBREF34 . That work presents a part-of-speech (POS) dictionary built from Wiktionary, where the POS tagger is also constrained to options available in their type-level POS dictionary, improving performance. Our transformation means that datasets are prepared for similar experiments with morphological tagging. It would also be reasonable to incorporate this tool as a subroutine to UDPipe BIBREF35 and Udapi BIBREF36 . We leave open the task of converting in the opposite direction, turning UniMorph MSDs into Universal Dependencies MSDs.
Because our conversion rules are interpretable, we identify shortcomings in both resources, using each as validation for the other. We were able to find specific instances of incorrectly applied UniMorph annotation, as well as specific instances of cross-lingual inconsistency in both resources. These findings will harden both resources and better align them with their goal of universal, cross-lingual annotation.
We thank Hajime Senuma and John Sylak-Glassman for early comments in devising the starting language-independent mapping from Universal Dependencies to UniMorph.

Figure and table captions:
Figure 1: Example of annotation disagreement in UD between two languages on translations of one phrase, reproduced from Malaviya et al. (2018). The final word in each, “refrescante”, is not inflected for gender: It has the same surface form whether masculine or feminine. Only in Portuguese, it is annotated as masculine to reflect grammatical concord with the noun it modifies.
Table 1: Inflected forms of the English verb prove, along with their Penn Treebank tags
Table 2: Attested annotations for the Spanish verb form “mandaba” “I/he/she/it commanded”. Note that UD separates the part of speech from the remainder of the morphosyntactic description. In each schema, order of the values is irrelevant.
Figure 2: Transliterated Persian with a gloss and translation from Karimi-Doostan (2011), annotated in a Persianspecific schema. The light verb construction “latme zadan” (“to damage”) has been spread across the sentence. Multiword constructions like this are a challenge for word-level tagging schemata.
Table 3: Token-level recall when converting Universal Dependencies tags to UniMorph tags. CSV refers to the lookup-based system. Post-editing refers to the proposed method.
Table 4: Tagging F1 using UD sentences annotated with either original UD MSDs or UniMorph-converted MSDs

Questions about this paper:
Which languages do they validate on?

Answers:
Ar, Bg, Ca, Cs, Da, De, En, Es, Eu, Fa, Fi, Fr, Ga, He, Hi, Hu, It, La, Lt, Lv, Nb, Nl, Nn, PL, Pt, Ro, Ru, Sl, Sv, Tr, Uk, Ur