--- title: "SUD or Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies — Gerdes 2018" description: "To address these problems, the authors propose SUD, a surface-syntactic annotation scheme. 7 references, cited by 72 papers here." authors: ["Kim Gerdes", "Bruno Guillaume", "Sylvain Kahane", "Guy Perrier"] year: 2018 venue: "Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018)" source: "https://aclanthology.org/W18-6008/" doi: "10.18653/v1/w18-6008" licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/gerdes-2018-sud-or-surface-syntactic-universal/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/gerdes-2018-sud-or-surface-syntactic-universal/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2018](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2018/page/3/) / SUD or Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies: An annotation scheme near-isomorphic to UD # SUD or Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies: An annotation scheme near-isomorphic to UD **Authors:** [Kim Gerdes](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/kim-gerdes/), [Bruno Guillaume](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/bruno-guillaume/), [Sylvain Kahane](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/sylvain-kahane/) and [Guy Perrier](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/guy-perrier/) · **Year:** 2018 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W18-6008/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W18-6008.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/w18-6008](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w18-6008) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2901677362) **Citations:** 72 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [72](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/gerdes-2018-sud-or-surface-syntactic-universal/cited-by/) in our library, of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary The authors argue that the UD scheme, in which the head is always a content word, makes syntactic trees too flat. It also hides the hierarchy among function words. Moreover, UD relation names include the part of speech of the dependent, so a single syntactic position receives different labels. To address these problems, the authors propose SUD, a surface-syntactic annotation scheme. In it, the head is determined by the distribution of the word, so prepositions, auxiliaries and copulas become heads. Conjuncts form a chain rather than a "bouquet". Function labels do not depend on the part of speech: for example, a single label subj instead of nsubj and csubj. The relations are organized into a hierarchy that allows underspecified labels. On the Grew platform, the authors wrote graph rewriting rules for conversion in both directions: UD→SUD and SUD→UD. The round-trip conversion was tested on the test sets of all 122 UD 2.2 treebanks: information is preserved almost without loss. Unstable trees often point to inconsistent annotation, so the method is suitable for detecting errors in UD. ## Key points - After the round-trip conversion UD→SUD→UD, the median LAS is 94.1% and the median UAS is 98.8% (122 UD 2.2 corpora, test sets). - The lowest LAS is found for UD_Korean-Kaist (71.8%), UD_Japanese-BCCWJ (74.0%) and UD_Japanese-GSD (74.4%). The highest is UD_Hungarian-Szeged (98.6%). UD_Warlpiri-UFAL and UD_Telugu-MTG reached a UAS of 100%, while UD_Yoruba-YTB has the lowest UAS (85.0%). - The main source of discrepancies is a relation label that does not match the part of speech of the dependent. For instance, in UD_Korean-PUD, the dependent of 22.4% of advmod relations is tagged with a part of speech other than ADV. - SUD trees are deeper but have shorter dependencies. In an example from the EWT corpus, the depth increases from 3 to 5, while the maximum number of dependents of a node drops from 8 to 5. The authors relate this to the principle of dependency length minimization. - All 122 UD 2.2 treebanks converted to SUD, as well as the Grew grammars, are available at gitlab.inria.fr/grew/SUD. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/linguistics/) Topics: [🌐 Universal Dependencies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/universal-dependencies/) ## Institutions - [Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/centre-national-de-la-recherche-scientifique/) — Research institute, Paris, France · 83 works · 59,287 citations - [Institut national de recherche en sciences et technologies du numérique](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/institut-national-de-recherche-en-sciences-et-technologies-du-numerique/) — Research institute, Le Chesnay-Rocquencourt, France · 55 works · 16,624 citations - [Laboratoire Lorrain de Recherche en Informatique et ses Applications](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/laboratoire-lorrain-de-recherche-en-informatique-et-ses-applications/) — Research institute, Nancy, France · 19 works · 3,389 citations - [Université de Lorraine](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/universite-de-lorraine/) — University, Nancy, France · 13 works · 772 citations - [Université Sorbonne Nouvelle](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/universite-sorbonne-nouvelle/) — University, Paris, France · 5 works · 457 citations - [SEMAGRAMME: Analyse Sémantique de la Langue](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/semagramme-analyse-semantique-de-la-langue/) — Research institute, Villers-lès-Nancy, France · 6 works · 221 citations - [Modèles Dynamiques Corpus](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/modeles-dynamiques-corpus/) — Research institute, Nanterre, France · 3 works · 190 citations - [Université Paris Nanterre](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/universite-paris-nanterre/) — University, Nanterre, France · 3 works · 190 citations - [Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/labs/laboratoire-de-phonetique-et-phonologie/) — Research institute, Paris, France · 2 works · 174 citations ## Cite Cite as: Kim Gerdes, Bruno Guillaume, Sylvain Kahane and Guy Perrier. 2018. SUD or Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies: An annotation scheme near-isomorphic to UD. Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018). The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{gerdes2018sud, title = {{SUD or Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies: An annotation scheme near-isomorphic to UD}}, author = {Kim Gerdes, Bruno Guillaume, Sylvain Kahane and Guy Perrier}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018)}, year = {2018}, doi = {10.18653/v1/w18-6008}, url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/w18-6008} } ``` - [← previous SGM: Sequence Generation Model for Multi-label Classification](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yang-2018-sgm-sequence-generation-model-multi/) - [next → Mapping to Declarative Knowledge for Word Problem Solving](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/roy-2018-mapping-declarative-knowledge-word-problem/) - [↑ back to papers of 2018](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2018/page/3/) ## References 7 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Leonard Bloomfield. 1933. Language. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Leonard+Bloomfield%2E+1933%2E+Language%2E) 2. Igor Mel’čuk. 1988. Dependency Syntax: Theory and Practice, SUNY Press. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Igor+Mel%E2%80%99%C4%8Duk%2E+1988%2E+Dependency+Syntax%3A+Theory+and+Practice%2C+SUNY+Press%2E) 3. Ines Rehbein, Julius Steen, Bich-Ngoc Do. 2017. Universal Dependencies are hard to parse–or are they? Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2017). [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ines+Rehbein%2C+Julius+Steen%2C+Bich%2DNgoc+Do%2E+2017%2E+Universal+Dependencies+are+hard+to+parse%E2%80%93or+are+they%3F+Proceedings+of+the+Fourth+International+Conference+on+Dependency+Linguistics+%28Depling+2017%29%2E) 4. Guglielmo Cinque, 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective. Oxford University Press. 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