---
title: "Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection — Nivre 2020"
description: "The paper describes the second version of the guidelines (UD v2) and explains how it differs from UD v1. 22 references, cited by 446 papers here."
authors: ["Joakim Nivre", "Marie-Catherine de Marneffe", "Filip Ginter"]
year: 2020
venue: "LREC 2020 (Marseille)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.497/"
licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA / LREC 2020)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nivre-2020-universal-dependencies-v2/"
---
[Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nivre-2020-universal-dependencies-v2/)

[home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2020](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2020/page/2/) / Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection

# Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection

**Authors:** [Joakim Nivre](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/joakim-nivre/), [Marie-Catherine de Marneffe](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/marie-catherine-de-marneffe/) and [Filip Ginter](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/filip-ginter/) · **Year:** 2020 · **Venue:** LREC 2020 (Marseille) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA / LREC 2020)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.497/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.497.pdf)

**Citations:** [446](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nivre-2020-universal-dependencies-v2/cited-by/) in our library, of the 140,884 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
Universal Dependencies (UD) is an open community project. Its goal is to annotate treebanks for many languages according to shared principles, making it easier to build multilingual syntactic parsers and to study cross-lingual transfer. The paper describes the second version of the guidelines (UD v2) and explains how it differs from UD v1. The annotation scheme is lexicalist and based on dependency grammar. Text is first divided into syntactic words: clitics are split off and contracted forms are decomposed. Each word then receives a lemma, a universal part-of-speech tag and morphological features. Syntax is represented as a dependency tree in which relations between content words, rather than function words, take precedence. The set of universal categories is fixed, but individual languages may add their own relation subtypes and language-specific features. In v2, spaces were allowed within words, the inventory of features was expanded, the rules for several tags were clarified, and the enhanced representation was refined. The authors also survey the treebanks available for 90 languages. UD served as the basis for the CoNLL 2017 and 2018 shared tasks, which gave rise to parsers that analyze raw text in many languages.

## Key points
- The annotation has three layers: segmentation into syntactic words (multiword tokens), morphology (lemma, one of 17 UPOS tags, features) and syntax (37 universal relation types). Relations are divided into clausal and nominal ones, and within the clause into core arguments and other dependents. Subtypes such as nsubj:pass and aux:pass are added by individual languages.
- Main changes in v2: the CONJ tag was renamed CCONJ. Spaces within words are now allowed for languages such as Vietnamese, and in other languages only for a restricted list of cases (numbers, abbreviations). New features (Clusivity, Evident, NounClass, Polite, Abbr, Foreign, Typo) and new values were added, and some were renamed (Negative → Polarity, Trans → Conv).
- Scale: the project started in 2014 and has more than 300 contributors. It covers 90 languages, and the number of treebanks grew more than fourfold from UD v1.2 to v2.5. The LINDAT repository recorded 46,439 downloads (as of November 2019).
- The scheme grew out of three earlier systems: (universal) Stanford dependencies, the Google universal tags and Interset.
- The CoNLL 2017 and CoNLL 2018 shared tasks were run on UD data. Between them, LAS rose noticeably for most languages, especially where data had been added.

*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/) · [🗂️ Treebanks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/treebanks/) · [🌍 Multilingual & cross-lingual NLP](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/multilingual-nlp/)

## Cite

Cite as: Joakim Nivre, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe and Filip Ginter. 2020. Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection. LREC 2020 (Marseille).

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{nivre2020universal,
  title = {{Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection}},
  author = {Joakim Nivre, Marie-Catherine {de Marneffe} and Filip Ginter},
  booktitle = {LREC 2020 (Marseille)},
  year = {2020},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.497/}
}
```

- [← previous ProphetNet: Predicting Future N-gram for Sequence-to-SequencePre-training](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/qi-2020-prophetnet-predicting-future-n-gram/)
- [next → Masked Language Model Scoring](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/salazar-2020-masked-language-model-scoring/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2020](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2020/page/2/)

## References

22 references, 11 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Andrews, A. D. (2007). The major functions of the noun phrase. In Timothy Shopen, editor, Language Typology Genre Academic Bible Blog Email Fiction Grammar examples Learner essays Legal Medical \# 4 10 17 2 42 13 2 22 6 [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Andrews%2C+A%2E+D%2E+%282007%29%2E+The+major+functions+of+the+noun+phrase%2E+In+Timothy+Shopen%2C+editor%2C+Language+Typology+Genre+Academic+Bible+Blog+Email+Fiction+Grammar+examples+Learner+essays+Legal+Medical+%5C%23+4+1)
2. Genre News Non-fiction Poetry Reviews Social Spoken Web Wiki \# 98 57 4 7 9 18 9 46 Table 5: Genres in UD v2.5 with number of treebanks. and Syntactic Description. Second Edition. Volume I: Clause Structure, pages 132–223. Cambridge University Press. de Marneffe, M.-C. and Manning, C. D. (2008). The… [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/marneffe-2014-universal-stanford-dependencies-cross-linguistic/)
3. Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, et al., editors. (2017). Proceedings of the NoDaLiDa 2017 Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2017). [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Marie%2DCatherine+de+Marneffe%2C+et+al%2E%2C+editors%2E+%282017%29%2E+Proceedings+of+the+NoDaLiDa+2017+Workshop+on+Universal+Dependencies+%28UDW+2017%29%2E)
4. Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, et al., editors. (2018). Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018). [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Marie%2DCatherine+de+Marneffe%2C+et+al%2E%2C+editors%2E+%282018%29%2E+Proceedings+of+the+Second+Workshop+on+Universal+Dependencies+%28UDW+2018%29%2E)
5. Droganova, K. and Zeman, D. (2019). Towards deep Universal Dependencies. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2019), pages 144–152. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Droganova%2C+K%2E+and+Zeman%2C+D%2E+%282019%29%2E+Towards+deep+Universal+Dependencies%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+Fifth+International+Conference+on+Dependency+Linguistics+%28Depling%2C+SyntaxFest+2019%29%2C+pages+144%E2%80%93152%2E)
6. Gerdes, K. and Kahane, S. (2015). Non-constituent coordination and other coordinative constructions as dependency graphs. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2015), pages 101–110. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Gerdes%2C+K%2E+and+Kahane%2C+S%2E+%282015%29%2E+Non%2Dconstituent+coordination+and+other+coordinative+constructions+as+dependency+graphs%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+Third+International+Conference+on+Dependency+Linguistics)
7. Nivre, J., de Marneffe, M.-C., Ginter, F., Goldberg, Y., Hajič, J., Manning, C. D., McDonald, R., Petrov, S., Pyysalo, S., Silveira, N., Tsarfaty, R., and Zeman, D. (2016). Universal Dependencies v1: A multilingual treebank collection. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language… [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nivre-2016-universal-dependencies-v1-multilingual-treebank/)
8. Nivre, J., Marongiu, P., Ginter, F., Kanerva, J., Montemagni, S., Schuster, S., and Simi, M. (2018). Enhancing Universal Dependency treebanks: A case study. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2018). [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/nivre-2018-enhancing-universal-dependency-treebanks-case/)
9. Petrov, S., Das, D., and McDonald, R. (2012). A universal part-of-speech tagset. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/petrov-2012-universal-part-speech-tagset/)
10. Popel, M., Mareček, D., Štěpánek, J., Zeman, D., and Žabokrtský, Z. (2013). Coordination structures in dependency treebanks. In Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 517–527. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/popel-2013-coordination-structures-dependency-treebanks/)
11. Alexandre Rademaker et al., editors. (2019). Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2019). [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/anon-2019-proceedings-third-workshop-universal-dependencies/)
12. Ross, J. R. (1967). Constraints on Variables in Syntax. Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ross%2C+J%2E+R%2E+%281967%29%2E+Constraints+on+Variables+in+Syntax%2E+Ph%2ED%2E+thesis%2C+Massachusetts+Institute+of+Technology%2E)
13. Sag, I. A., Baldwin, T., Bond, F., Copestake, A. A., and Flickinger, D. (2002). Multiword expressions: A pain in the neck for NLP. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, pages 1–15. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/sag-2002-multiword-expressions-pain-neck-nlp/)
14. Schuster, S. and Manning, C. D. (2016). Enhanced English Universal Dependencies: An improved representation for natural language understanding tasks. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC). [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/schuster-2016-enhanced-english-universal-dependencies-improved/)
15. Sylak-Glassman, J., Kirov, C., Yarowsky, D., and Que, R. (2015). A language-independent feature schema for inflectional morphology. In Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 674–680. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Sylak%2DGlassman%2C+J%2E%2C+Kirov%2C+C%2E%2C+Yarowsky%2C+D%2E%2C+and+Que%2C+R%2E+%282015%29%2E+A+language%2Dindependent+feature+schema+for+inflectional+morphology%2E+In+Proceedings+of+the+53rd+Annual+Meeting+of+the+Association+for+Com)
16. Thompson, S. A. (1997). Discourse motivations for the core-oblique distinction as a language universal. In Akio Kamio, editor, Directions in Functional Linguistics, pages 59–82. John Benjamins. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Thompson%2C+S%2E+A%2E+%281997%29%2E+Discourse+motivations+for+the+core%2Doblique+distinction+as+a+language+universal%2E+In+Akio+Kamio%2C+editor%2C+Directions+in+Functional+Linguistics%2C+pages+59%E2%80%9382%2E+John+Benjamins%2E)
17. Zeman, D., Popel, M., Straka, M., Hajic, J., Nivre, J., Ginter, F., Luotolahti, J., Pyysalo, S., Petrov, S., Potthast, M., Tyers, F., Badmaeva, E., Gokirmak, M., Nedoluzhko, A., Cinkova, S., Hajic jr., J., Hlavacova, J., Kettnerová, V., Uresova, Z., Kanerva, J., Ojala, S., Missilä, A., Manning, C.… [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Zeman%2C+D%2E%2C+Popel%2C+M%2E%2C+Straka%2C+M%2E%2C+Hajic%2C+J%2E%2C+Nivre%2C+J%2E%2C+Ginter%2C+F%2E%2C+Luotolahti%2C+J%2E%2C+Pyysalo%2C+S%2E%2C+Petrov%2C+S%2E%2C+Potthast%2C+M%2E%2C+Tyers%2C+F%2E%2C+Badmaeva%2C+E%2E%2C+Gokirmak%2C+M%2E%2C+Nedoluzhko%2C+A%2E%2C+Cinkova%2C+S%2E%2C+Hajic+jr%2E)
18. CoNLL 2017 shared task: Multilingual parsing from raw text to Universal Dependencies. In Proceedings of the CoNLL 2017 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies, pages 1–19, Vancouver, Canada. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zeman-2017-conll-2017-shared-task-multilingual/)
19. Zeman, D., Hajič, J., Popel, M., Potthast, M., Straka, M., Ginter, F., Nivre, J., and Petrov, S. (2018). [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Zeman%2C+D%2E%2C+Hajic%CC%8C%2C+J%2E%2C+Popel%2C+M%2E%2C+Potthast%2C+M%2E%2C+Straka%2C+M%2E%2C+Ginter%2C+F%2E%2C+Nivre%2C+J%2E%2C+and+Petrov%2C+S%2E+%282018%29%2E)
20. CoNLL 2018 shared task: Multilingual parsing from raw text to Universal Dependencies. In Proceedings of the CoNLL 2018 Shared Task: Multilingual Parsing from Raw Text to Universal Dependencies, Brussels, Belgium. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zeman-2018-conll-2018-shared-task-multilingual/)
21. Zeman, D., Nivre, J., Abrams, M., Aepli, N., Agić, Ž., Ahrenberg, L., Aleksandravičiūtė, G., Antonsen, L., Aplonova, K., Aranzabe, M. J., Arutie, G., Asahara, M., Ateyah, L., Attia, M., Atutxa, A., Augustinus, L., Badmaeva, E., Ballesteros, M., Banerjee, E., Bank, S., Barbu Mititelu, V., Basmov… [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Zeman%2C+D%2E%2C+Nivre%2C+J%2E%2C+Abrams%2C+M%2E%2C+Aepli%2C+N%2E%2C+Agic%CC%81%2C+Z%CC%8C%2E%2C+Ahrenberg%2C+L%2E%2C+Aleksandravic%CC%8Ciu%CC%84te%CC%87%2C+G%2E%2C+Antonsen%2C+L%2E%2C+Aplonova%2C+K%2E%2C+Aranzabe%2C+M%2E+J%2E%2C+Arutie%2C+G%2E%2C+Asahara%2C+M%2E%2C+Ateyah%2C+L%2E%2C+Attia%2C+M%2E%2C+Atutxa%2C+A)
22. Zeman, D. (2008). Reusable tagset conversion using tagset drivers. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pages 213–218. [our card](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/zeman-2008-reusable-tagset-conversion-tagset-drivers/)