Towards better annotation practices for symmetrical voice in U niversal D ependencies (2025)

Abstract: Austronesian languages exhibit features that are challenging for Universal Dependencies: most notably, the symmetric voice system, whereby agent, patient, and instrumental arguments (among others) can be the pivot of a transitive structure – complicating the usual assumption that subjects of transitive sentences are semantic agents, and objects semantic patients. To showcase our ideas of how to address the representation of such systems in Universal Dependencies, we introduce a small treebank of sentences from texts and elicitation sessions in Gorontalo, an Austronesian language of Sulawesi (Indonesia), which exhibits a Philippine-type voice system. We discuss the annotation guidelines for this language, and the extensions of the Universal Dependencies guidelines that are needed to accommodate this and other Austronesian languages.

## introduction in universal dependencies @xcite , as in linguistics in general, the representation of morphosyntactic alignment of core arguments is heavily influenced by the grammatical traditions of indo-european languages -particularly latin. in such languages there is a clear syntactic subject, which corresponds in an unmarked (active voice) sentence to the semantic agent @xcite . such sentences can be passivized, so that the construction becomes intransitive, the semantic patient is the subject, and the agent is demoted to the status of an oblique, or dropped completely. austronesian languages, especially philippinetype languages, challenge this view by allowing arguments with various semantic roles to become the pivot of the sentence: the trigger of agreement, as shown by verbal morphology, and the syntactically privileged argument @xcite . the pivot of a transitive sentence can be actors, patients, instruments, locations, and many more. in many of these languages, no voice seems to be more privileged or less marked than any other; nor does the actor voice seem derived from the patient voice nor vice versa. analysis of these languages is problematic, and there is great debate regarding whether to label them as ergative-absolutive @xcite ; nominativeaccusative @xcite ; or a separative category @xcite , among other classifications. the grammatical relation of subject has been noted to be problematic in several languages @xcite , and in austronesian languages other terms such as pivot or focus are often used instead. nevertheless, the approach in austronesian language treebanks so far has been to use the existing labels of ud for austronesian languages -specifically, by representing the pivot argument of a sentence as the subject, regardless of the argument type. this is a decent compromise, and it allows the austronesian voice system to fall into the universal framework of ud. however, there are problems with this approach to annotation in the treebanks that exist so far, particularly for voices other than the actor voice. in this paper we will: ## related work several austronesian treebanks of varying sizes already exist in universal dependencies, and we use them as precedent for our annotation. aside from the austronesian treebanks themselves, de marneffe et al. (2021) discuss the representation of symmetric voice in their description of the universal dependencies framework. we are not aware of other studies or opinion pieces on this topic. ## annotation we took these issues into account when designing our annotation for gorontalo. our hope is to combine the best practices from the existing treebanks and to make it as clear as possible for users of universal dependencies. annotation was performed using arborator (guibon et al., 2020). ## discussion we have tried to be conservative with the annotations we make, keeping with the conventions of preceding treebanks and restricting the number of additions we need to make to the ud features and relations. however, we could go further in adding more features and labels specifically for austronesian languages. for example, we could add piv (pivot) and npiv (non-pivot) respectively as case values for the pivot markers. this would remove the oddness of using gen to describe the role of non-pivot core arguments, while also showing that non-pivots can perform multiple roles. alternatively, we could keep the gen value for clear instances of nominal modification as in fig. 1 . ## conclusion we have presented a summary of the current state of symmetrical voice and alignment annotation for austronesian languages, and our criticisms and suggestions for improvements. in short, we have four main suggestions: we hope that these proposals will be discussed by the universal dependencies community and any contributors of new austronesian languages, so that austronesian languages can be included in a way that properly describes them and de-centres indo-european terminology.