Identifying and Handling Cross-Treebank Inconsistencies in UD: A Pilot Study

AbstractThe Universal Dependencies treebanks are a still-growing collection of treebanks for a wide range of languages, all annotated with a common inventory of dependency relations. Yet, the usages of the relations can be categorically different even for treebanks of the same language. We present a pilot study on identifying such inconsistencies in a language-independent way and conduct an experiment which illustrates that a proper handling of inconsistencies can improve parsing performance by several percentage points.