---
title: "Universal Dependencies and Quantitative — Alzetta 2018"
description: "The authors test whether typological data about languages can be obtained from manually revised (\"gold\") treebanks."
authors: ["Chiara Alzetta", "Felice Dell'Orletta", "Simonetta Montemagni", "Giulia Venturi"]
year: 2018
venue: "Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)"
source: "https://aclanthology.org/L18-1719/"
licence: "CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/alzetta-2018-universal-dependencies-quantitative-typological-trends/"
---
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# Universal Dependencies and Quantitative Typological Trends. A Case Study on Word Order

**Authors:** [Chiara Alzetta](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/chiara-alzetta/), [Felice Dell'Orletta](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/felice-dell-orletta/), [Simonetta Montemagni](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/simonetta-montemagni/), [Giulia Venturi](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/giulia-venturi/) · **Year:** 2018 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0 (ELRA, LREC proceedings)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L18-1719/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L18-1719.pdf) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2805913469)

**Citations:** 8 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · [6](#cited-by) in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The authors test whether typological data about languages can be obtained from manually revised ("gold") treebanks. They propose a new methodology. Algorithms that rank individual syntactic dependencies by the plausibility of their annotation are normally used to separate reliable parser output from unreliable output. Here they are applied to linguistic analysis. The case study is word order in English, Italian and Spanish, based on UD treebanks. Two constructions are examined: subject and verb (nsubj), and adjective and noun (amod). The goal is not only to count how often each order occurs, but also to compare the languages and to determine which factors affect the choice of a variant and how strongly. The corpus data give a finer-grained picture than the binary values in the typological databases WALS and SSWL. For example, in all three languages the subject mostly precedes the verb, but the share of other placements differs noticeably. The authors call the first results encouraging. The paper shows how multilingual UD resources and NLP tools can refine and complement classical typological descriptions.

## Key points
- Data: UD treebanks (Universal Dependencies release 2.0) for English, Italian and Spanish, including the Italian IUDT.
- A noun subject follows the verb in about 30% of cases in the Italian treebank, in 18% in the Spanish one, and in only 8% in the English one.
- For amod, the Adjective-Noun order prevails in English. In Italian and Spanish, the adjective more often follows the noun.
- The databases disagree. According to WALS, Italian and Spanish have no dominant subject–verb order, whereas according to SSWL the Subject-Verb order is productive in both languages. WALS records the dominant order, while SSWL records productive orders.
- The paper builds on Tusa et al. (2016), who showed on IUDT that ranking dependencies by plausibility reflects the degree of markedness of constructions.

*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/shelves/linguistics/)

Topics: [Universal Dependencies](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/universal-dependencies/) · [Treebanks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/topics/treebanks/)

## Cited by

Cited by

6 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 2 of them have a page here, 4 not yet.

- [Estimating POS Annotation Consistency of Different Treebanks in a Language](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/aggarwal-2020-estimating-pos-annotation-consistency-different/)
- [Quantitative Linguistic Investigations across Universal Dependencies Treebanks](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/alzetta-2020-quantitative-linguistic-investigations-across-universal/)

## Cite

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

```bibtex
@inproceedings{alzetta2018universal,
  title = {{Universal Dependencies and Quantitative Typological Trends. A Case Study on Word Order}},
  author = {Alzetta, Chiara and Dell'Orletta, Felice and Montemagni, Simonetta and Venturi, Giulia},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)},
  year = {2018},
  doi = {10.63317/2jh455cfknyt},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2jh455cfknyt}
}
```

- [← previous Unified Pragmatic Models for Generating and Following Instructions](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/fried-2018-unified-pragmatic-models-generating-following/)
- [next → Universal Dependencies for Amharic](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/ud-2018-seyoum-universal-dependencies-amharic/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2018](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2018/page/3/)

## References

29 references, 1 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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