Universal Dependencies is an open community effort to create cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages within a dependency-based lexicalist framework. The annotation consists in a linguistically motivated word segmentation; a morphological layer comprising lemmas, universal part-of-speech tags, and standardized morphological features; and a syntactic layer focusing on syntactic relations between predicates, arguments and modifiers. In this paper, we describe version 2 of the universal guidelines (UD v2), discuss the major changes from UD v1 to UD v2, and give an overview of the currently available treebanks for 90 languages.

Low-resource languages present enormous NLP opportunities as well as varying degrees of difficulties. The newly released treebank of hand-annotated parts of the Yoruba Bible provides an avenue for dependency analysis of the Yoruba language; the application of a new grammar formalism to the language. In this paper, we discuss our choice of Universal Dependencies, important dependency annotation decisions considered in the creation of the first annotation guidelines for Yoruba and results of our parsing experiments. We also lay the foundation for future incorporation of other domains with the initial test on Yoruba Wikipedia articles and highlighted future directions for the rapid expansion of the treebank.

This paper presents the first dependency treebank for Bhojpuri, a resource-poor language that belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family. The objective behind the Bhojpuri Treebank (BHTB) project is to create a substantial, syntactically annotated treebank which not only acts as a valuable resource in building language technological tools, also helps in cross-lingual learning and typological research. Currently, the treebank consists of 4,881 annotated tokens in accordance with the annotation scheme of Universal Dependencies (UD). A Bhojpuri tagger and parser were created using machine learning approach. The accuracy of the model is 57.49% UAS, 45.50% LAS, 79.69% UPOS accuracy and 77.64% XPOS accuracy. The paper describes the details of the project including a discussion on linguistic analysis and annotation process of the Bhojpuri UD treebank.

This overview introduces the task of parsing into enhanced universal dependencies, describes the datasets used for training and evaluation, and evaluation metrics. We outline various approaches and discuss the results of the shared task.