[Lingtyp] Call for Papers: Dependency Grammar for Typology; Workshop @ ALT 15 in Zhuhai, China; November 8-10, 2024

Tue Jan 30 20:48:25 UTC 2024

<apologies for cross-posting>

Call for Papers: Dependency Grammar for Typology

Workshop @ ALT 15 in Zhuhai, China; November 8-10, 2024

Large-scale multilingual corpora such as Universal Dependencies (de 
Marneffe et al 2021) have enabled advances in quantitative methods in 
morphosyntactic typology, allowing a transition from binary or 
multivariate classifications of linguistic features to more nuanced, 
continuous classifications. These enable us to capture variation better 
than ever before (Levshina et al. 2023) while studying linguistic 
variation from a token-based perspective (Haspelmath 2018). Going beyond 
use of these resources for typological research directly, the Universal 
Dependencies treebanks are used to annotate further large-scale 
multilingual corpora (Kondratyuk & Straka 2019) and to syntactically 
parse languages which are not covered within the framework yet as well 
as for zero-shot parsing (Ammar et al. 2016; Tran & Bisazza 2019; Üstün 
et al. 2022). Hence, they have become a valuable tool for multilingual 
morphosyntactic analysis, the products of which are indispensable for 
typology.

However, large-scale multilingual resources such as the Universal 
Dependencies treebanks have also been conceived of as problematic. A 
major concern for typologists has always been language sampling: this 
type of resource is typically biased towards including mostly WEIRD and 
especially European languages. Secondly, there is (as of yet) no devoted 
program to counter this sampling bias, i.e. any coordinated effort to 
include low-resource and less-described languages is on the shoulders of 
individual language specialists, whose time and funds are already under 
pressure. Third, as with any attempt to construct cross-linguistically 
appropriate schemes for tagging and annotation, the universal 
applicability of such schemes has been called into question (Croft et 
al. 2017).

This workshop aims to bring together typologists working using 
dependency-annotated resources for quantitative typological research. We 
aim to include both new studies that peruse dependency-annotated corpora 
to answer typological questions, as well as more critical authors who 
point to the limitations of ‘dependency grammar for typology’. This also 
includes proposals on how quantitative typology can be conducted using 
heterogeneous data sources and the development of new resources, as long 
as a focus on comparative research is maintained.**

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

➔Synchronic comparative studies on variation that can only be accessed 
using corpora, such as word order (Levshina 2019, Talamo & Verkerk 2022);

➔Comparative studies that employ such resources to uncover universal 
principles of grammar, including dependency length optimization 
(Futrell, Mahowald & Gibson 2015; Liu 2021, Yingqi, Blasi & Bickel 
2022), word order universals (Choi et al. 2021, Gerdes et al. 2021, Yan 
& Liu 2023), the memory-surprisal trade-off (Hahn, Degen & Futrell 2021);

➔Diachronic studies of language change, such as the evolution rate of 
word order in main and subordinate clauses (Jing et al. 2023) or word 
order change (Hahn & Xu 2022);

➔Theoretical challenges in annotation, such as the universality of 
syntactic labels, as well as of parts of speech, morpho-syntactic 
features, and tokenization (Croft et al. 2017, Osborne & Gerdes 2019, 
Sinnemäki and Haakana 2020, Hohn 2021);

➔Development of new resources, in particular with respect to 
low-resource languages, starting from different type of texts (corpora, 
fieldwork notes, existing treebanks, Wikipedia, grammars, etc.) 
(Zariquiey et al. 2022, Kahane et al. 2023);

➔Projects that employ such resources to go beyond sentence-level 
syntactic dependencies by developing additional layers of annotation for 
studying discourse and information structure, among other levels;

➔Robustness and statistical validity of typological quantitative 
measures on the basis of different theoretical approaches and annotation 
schema (Gerdes et al. 2018, Osborne & Gerdes 2019, Yan & Liu 2019).

➔Limits of dependency grammar for typology: issues such as unbalanced 
sampling, limitations of annotation in terms of availability, quality, 
as well as ‘missing’ annotation, and heterogeneousness of the annotation 
across treebanks, both in terms of application and quality.

We envision a worthwhile exchange between more traditional typologists 
and typologists who have already worked with these resources. If you 
want to join us, please submit your abstract to ALT15, explicitly 
indicating that it is intended for the workshop "Dependency Grammar for 
Typology". Instructions on how to submit abstracts can be found on the 
ALT2024 page:

_https://sites.google.com/view/alt2024/call-for-papers_---- Abstracts 
are due March 15th!

Organizers: Andrew Dyer, Luigi Talamo, Annemarie Verkerk (Saarland 
University), Luca Brigada Villa, and Erica Biagetti (Universities of 
Bergamo and Pavia)

    References

Ammar, Waleed,George Mulcaire, Miguel Ballesteros, Chris Dyer & Noah A. 
Smith. 2016. Many Languages, One Parser. In Transactions of the 
Association for Computational Linguistics, edited by Lillian Lee, Mark 
Johnson and Kristina Toutanova. 4:431–444.

Choi, Hee-Soo, Bruno Guillaume & Karën Fort. 
2021.<https://aclanthology.org/2021.quasy-1.3>_Corpus-based language 
universals analysis using Universal Dependencies_. In /Proceedings of 
the Second Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (Quasy, SyntaxFest 2021)/, 
33–44, Sofia, Bulgaria. Association for Computational Linguistics.

Croft, William, Dawn Nordquist, Katherine Looney & Michael Regan. 
Linguistic Typology Meets Universal Dependencies. 2017. In Proceedings 
of the 15th International Workshop on Treebanks and Linguistic Theories 
(TLT15), edited by Markus Dickinson, Jan Hajic, Sandra Kübler, and Adam 
Przepiórkowski. 63–75. CEUR Workshop Proceedings.

Futrell, Richard, Kyle Mahowal & Edward Gibson. 2015. Quantifying Word 
Order Freedom in Dependency Corpora. In Proceedings of the Third 
International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2015), 
edited by Joakim Nivre, Eva Hajičová, 91–100, Uppsala, Sweden. Uppsala 
University, Uppsala, Sweden.

Gerdes, Kim. Bruno Guillaume, Sylvain Kahane & Guy Perrier. 2018. SUD or 
Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies: An annotation scheme 
near-isomorphic to UD. Universal Dependencies Workshop 2018. Brussels, 
Belgium. ⟨10.18653/v1/W18-6008⟩. ⟨hal-01930614⟩

Hahn, Michael, Judith Degen & Richard Futrell. 2021. Modeling word and 
morpheme order in natural language as an efficient trade-off of memory 
and surprisal. Psychological Review, 128(4), 726–756. 
https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000269 <https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000269>

Hahn, Michael & Yang Xu. 2022.Crosslinguistic word order variation 
reflects evolutionary pressures of dependency and information locality. 
In Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States 
of America vol. 119,24 (2022): e2122604119. doi:10.1073/pnas.2122604119

Kondratyuk, Dan& Milan Straka. 2019. 75 Languages, 1 Model: Parsing 
Universal Dependencies Universally. in Proceedings of the 2019 
Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 
9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing 
(EMNLP-IJCNLP), edited by Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun 
Wan, 2779–2795.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2018. How Comparative Concepts and Descriptive 
Linguistic Categories Are Different. In Aspects of Linguistic Variation, 
edited by Daniël Olmen, Tanja Mortelmans, and Frank Brisard, 83–114. 
Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.

Hohn, Georg F K. 2021. Towards a Consistent Annotation of Nominal Person 
in Universal Dependencies. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on 
Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2021), edited by Miryam de 
Lhoneux, Reut Tsarfaty, 75-83.

Jing, Yingi, Damián E. Blasi & Balthasar Bickel. 2022. Dependency-length 
minimization and its limits: A possible role for a probabilistic version 
of the final-over-final condition. Language 98(3), 397–418.

Jing, Yingi, Paul Widmer & Balthasar Bickel. 2023. Word order evolves at 
similar rates in main and subordinate clauses. Diachronica. 
https://doi.org/10.1075/dia.20035.jin

Kahane, Sylvain, Santiago Herrera, Bruno Guillaume & Kim Gerdes. 2023. 
Autogramm : développement simultané de treebanks et de grammaires à 
partir de corpus. In Actes de CORIA-TALN 2023. Actes de la 30e 
Conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles (TALN), 
volume 6 : projets, 37–42, Paris, France. ATALA.

Levshina, Natalia. 2019. Token-based typology and word order entropy: A 
study based on Universal Dependencies. Linguistic Typology 23(3), 
533-572. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2019-0025 
<https://doi.org/10.1515/lingty-2019-0025>

Levshina, Natalia, Savithry Namboodiripad, Marc Allassonnière-Tang, 
Mathew Alex Kramer, Luigi Talamo, Annemarie Verkerk, Sasha Wilmoth et 
al. 2023. Why We Need a Gradient Approach to Word Order. Linguistics 
61(4), 825–883. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/yg9bf 
<https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/yg9bf>.

Liu, Zoey. 2021. The Crosslinguistic Relationship between Ordering 
Flexibility and Dependency Length Minimization: A Data-Driven Approach. 
In Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics: Vol. 4, 
Article 25. https://doi.org/10.7275/xt42-4282 
<https://doi.org/10.7275/xt42-4282>__

Marneffe, Marie-Catherine de, Christopher D. Manning, Joakim Nivre, and 
Daniel Zeman. ‘Universal Dependencies’. /Computational Linguistics/ 47, 
no. 2 (20 May 2021): 255–308. https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00402 
<https://doi.org/10.1162/coli_a_00402>.

Osborne, Timothy & Kim Gerdes. 2019. The status of function words in 
dependency grammar: A critique of Universal Dependencies (UD). Glossa: a 
journal of general linguistics 4(1): 17. doi: 
https://doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.537

Sinnemäki, Kaius & Viljami Haakana. 2020. Variation in Universal 
Dependencies Annotation: A Token-Based Typological Case Study on 
Adpossessive Constructions. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on 
Universal Dependencies (UDW 2020), edited by Marie-Catherine de 
Marneffe, Miryam de Lhoneux, Joakim Nivre, Sebastian Schuster, 158–167.

Talamo, Luigi & Annemarie Verkerk. 2022. A new methodology for an old 
problem. Italian Journal of Linguistics, 34(2), 171-226.

Tran, Ke & Bisazza, Arianna. 2019. Zero-shot Dependency Parsing with 
Pre-trained Multilingual Sentence Representations. In Proceedings of the 
2nd Workshop on Deep Learning Approaches for Low-Resource NLP (DeepLo), 
edited by Colin Cherry, Greg Durrett, George Foster, Reza Haffari, 
Shahram Khadivi, Nanyun Peng, Xiang Ren, Swabha Swayamdipta, 281–288.

Üstün, Ahmet, Arianna Bisazza, Gosse Bouma & Gertjan van Noord. 2022. 
UDapter: Typology-based Language Adapters for Multilingual Dependency 
Parsing and Sequence Labeling. Computational Linguistics. 48. 1-37.

Yan, Jianwei and Haitao Liu. 2019. Which annotation scheme is more 
expedient to measure syntactic difficulty and cognitive demand?. In 
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Quantitative Syntax (Quasy, 
SyntaxFest 2019), 16–24, Paris, France. Association for Computational 
Linguistics.

Yan, Jianwei & Haitao Liu. 2023. Basic word order typology revisited: a 
crosslinguistic quantitative study based on UD and WALS. Linguistics 
Vanguard. https://doi.org/10.1515/lingvan-2021-0001

Zariquiey, Roberto, Arturo Oncevay & Javier Vera. 2022. CLD² Language 
Documentation Meets Natural Language Processing for Revitalising 
Endangered Languages. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on the Use of 
Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages, 20–30, 
Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20240130/4f582ae1/attachment.htm>