SUD or Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies: An annotation scheme near-isomorphic to UD

Abstract

This article proposes a surface-syntactic annotation scheme called SUD that is near-isomorphic to the Universal Dependencies (UD) annotation scheme while following distributional criteria for defining the dependency tree structure and the naming of the syntactic functions. Rule-based graph transformation grammars allow for a bi-directional transformation of UD into SUD. The back-and-forth transformation can serve as an error-mining tool to assure the intralanguage and inter-language coherence of the UD treebanks.