The paper presents a discussion on the main linguistic phenomena of user-generated texts found in web and social media, and proposes a set of annotation guidelines for their treatment within the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework. Given on the one hand the increasing number of treebanks featuring user-generated content, and its somewhat inconsistent treatment in these resources on the other, the aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to provide a short, though comprehensive, overview of such treebanks - based on available literature - along with their main features and a comparative analysis of their annotation criteria, and (2) to propose a set of tentative UD-based annotation guidelines, to promote consistent treatment of the particular phenomena found in these types of texts. The main goal of this paper is to provide a common framework for those teams interested in developing similar resources in UD, thus enabling cross-linguistic consistency, which is a principle that has always been in the spirit of UD.

We describe the European Language Resource Infrastructure (ELRI), a decentralised network to help collect, prepare and share language resources. The infrastructure was developed within a project co-funded by the Connecting Europe Facility Programme of the European Union, and has been deployed in the four Member States participating in the project, namely France, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. ELRI provides sustainable and flexible means to collect and share language resources via National Relay Stations, to which members of public institutions can freely subscribe. The infrastructure includes fully automated data processing engines to facilitate the preparation, sharing and wider reuse of useful language resources that can help optimise human and automated translation services in the European Union.