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# Converting an English-Swedish Parallel Treebank to Universal Dependencies

**Authors:** [Lars Ahrenberg](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/lars-ahrenberg/) · **Year:** 2015 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2015) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/W15-2103](https://aclanthology.org/W15-2103/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-SA 3.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/) — summary only

[**17** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2250348002) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**15** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/ud-2015-ahrenberg-converting-english-swedish-parallel-treebank/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2015)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/W15-21/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/W15-2103/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/W15-2103.pdf)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2250348002)

**Authors (1)**

1. [Ahrenberg, Lars](https://openalex.org/A5067870406) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2490-7411) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/1742056) · h 17 · 2116 citations · 124 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex-snapshot (2026-10-14); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

The paper reports how the LinES English-Swedish parallel treebank was converted to Universal Dependencies by a rule program. The converted version uses only UD relations and POS tags, and it adds dependencies for punctuation. Tokenisation follows UD, which raises the token count by about 0.9%. The conversion was checked by frequency comparisons and by a manual review of 50 English and 50 Swedish segments, where accuracy was around 90%. The paper then compares the output with the existing EUD and SUD treebanks, which are UD-compatible but treat several phenomena differently. Keeping the parallel treebank internally consistent conflicts with matching the monolingual UD treebanks.

## Ideas

- I1. `en/src/convert.rs` and `en convert-check`: log, for each conversion rule, how many relations or tags it changes (relabelling, reversal, swap, addition). Fail the check when a rule's count moves between two runs. Run it twice before any claim about the rules.
- I2. `en/src/tok.rs`: the paper's rule that punctuation and clitics are separate tokens while multiword expressions are not joined until the dependency layer. Count how many tokens a UD-style split adds on EWT and on the test split of GUM; `en tok-eval` should report the same count.
- I3. Gate for `en convert`: draw a stratified sample of 50 English sentences per source treebank from the converter output and review them by hand, as the paper does. Record the review accuracy with its date, and report it next to the automatic numbers.

## For Mova

The chapters are [05. The writing system](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/05-writing-system/) (tokenisation) and [20. Syntax: the Universal Dependencies frame](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/20-syntax-overview/) (relations). The code is `en/src/convert.rs`, `en/src/tok.rs` and the `en convert-check` command. The data is NC-SA (summary only): any test on it must stay outside the build. Measure first the token increase that UD-style splitting gives on EWT.

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

## Cite

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

```
@inproceedings{ahrenberg2015converting,
  title = {{Converting an English-Swedish Parallel Treebank to Universal Dependencies}},
  author = {Ahrenberg, Lars},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling 2015)},
  year = {2015},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/W15-2103/}
}
```

- [← previous Universal Stanford dependencies: A cross-linguistic typology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ud-2014-marneffe-universal-stanford-dependencies-cross-linguistic/)
- [next → Universal Dependencies v1: A Multilingual Treebank Collection](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ud-2016-nivre-universal-dependencies-v1-multilingual-treebank/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

## References

11 references, 3 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. Lars Ahrenberg 2007. LinES: An English-Swedish Parallel Treebank. Proceedings of the 16th Nordic Conference of Computational Linguistics (NODAL-IDA, 2007). [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Lars+Ahrenberg+2007%2E+LinES%3A+An+English%2DSwedish+Parallel+Treebank%2E+Proceedings+of+the+16th+Nordic+Conference+of+Computational+Linguistics+%28NODAL%2DIDA%2C+2007%29%2E) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/bank-2007-ahrenberg-lines-english-swedish-parallel-treebank/)
2. Cristina Bosco, Simonetta Magni, Maria Simi 2013. Converting Italian treebanks: Towards an Italian Stanford dependency treebank 7th Linguistic Annotation Workshop and Interoperability with Discourse. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Cristina+Bosco%2C+Simonetta+Magni%2C+Maria+Simi+2013%2E+Converting+Italian+treebanks%3A+Towards+an+Italian+Stanford+dependency+treebank+7th+Linguistic+Annotation+Workshop+and+Interoperability+with+Discourse%2E)
3. Janna Lipenkova and Milan Souček 2014. Converting Russian Dependency Treebank to Stanford Typed Dependencies Representation. Proceedings of the 14th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. pages 143-147. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Janna+Lipenkova+and+Milan+Souc%CC%8Cek+2014%2E+Converting+Russian+Dependency+Treebank+to+Stanford+Typed+Dependencies+Representation%2E+Proceedings+of+the+14th+Conference+of+the+European+Chapter+of+the+Associat)
4. Marie-Catherine de Marneffe and Christopher D. Manning 2008 The Stanford typed dependencies representation. Workshop on Cross-framework and Cross-domain Parser Evaluation. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Marie%2DCatherine+de+Marneffe+and+Christopher+D%2E+Manning+2008+The+Stanford+typed+dependencies+representation%2E+Workshop+on+Cross%2Dframework+and+Cross%2Ddomain+Parser+Evaluation%2E) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/marneffe-2008-stanford-typed-dependencies-representation/)
5. Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Timothy Dozat, Natalia Silveira, Katri Haverinen, Filip Ginter, Joakim Nivre, and Christopher D. Manning 2014 Universal Stanford Dependencies: A cross-linguistic typology Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’14). [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Marie%2DCatherine+de+Marneffe%2C+Timothy+Dozat%2C+Natalia+Silveira%2C+Katri+Haverinen%2C+Filip+Ginter%2C+Joakim+Nivre%2C+and+Christopher+D%2E+Manning+2014+Universal+Stanford+Dependencies%3A+A+cross%2Dlinguistic+typology+) [our card](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ud-2014-marneffe-universal-stanford-dependencies-cross-linguistic/)
6. Ryan McDonald, Joakim Nivre, Yvonne Quimbach-Brundage, Yoav Goldberg, Dipanjan Das, Kuzman Ganchev, Keith Hall, Slav Petrov, Hao Zhang, Oscar Täckström, Claudia Bedini, Núria Bertomeu Castelló, and Jungmee Lee. 2013. Universal Dependency Annotation for Multilingual Parsing. Proceedings of the 51st Annual Meeting of the ACL, Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9 2013, pages 92-97. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Ryan+McDonald%2C+Joakim+Nivre%2C+Yvonne+Quimbach%2DBrundage%2C+Yoav+Goldberg%2C+Dipanjan+Das%2C+Kuzman+Ganchev%2C+Keith+Hall%2C+Slav+Petrov%2C+Hao+Zhang%2C+Oscar+Ta%CC%88ckstro%CC%88m%2C+Claudia+Bedini%2C+Nu%CC%81ria+Bertomeu+Castello%CC%81%2C+an)
7. Slav Petrov, Dipanjan Das, and Ryan McDonald. 2012. A universal part-of-speech tagset. Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC’12, Istanbul, Turkey, May 23-25 2012. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Slav+Petrov%2C+Dipanjan+Das%2C+and+Ryan+McDonald%2E+2012%2E+A+universal+part%2Dof%2Dspeech+tagset%2E+Proceedings+of+the+Eight+International+Conference+on+Language+Resources+and+Evaluation%2C+LREC%E2%80%9912%2C+Istanbul%2C+Turkey)
8. Sampo Pyysalo, Jenna Kanerva, Anna Missilä, Veronika Laippala, and Filip Ginter 2015. Universal Dependencies for Finnish. Proceedings of the 20th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics, Vilnius, Lithuania, May 12-13, 2015. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Sampo+Pyysalo%2C+Jenna+Kanerva%2C+Anna+Missila%CC%88%2C+Veronika+Laippala%2C+and+Filip+Ginter+2015%2E+Universal+Dependencies+for+Finnish%2E+Proceedings+of+the+20th+Nordic+Conference+on+Computational+Linguistics%2C+Vilni)
9. Pasi Tapanainen and Timo Järvinen 1997. A non-projective dependency parser. Proceedings of the fifth conference on Applied Natural Language Processing, pages 64-71. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Pasi+Tapanainen+and+Timo+Ja%CC%88rvinen+1997%2E+A+non%2Dprojective+dependency+parser%2E+Proceedings+of+the+fifth+conference+on+Applied+Natural+Language+Processing%2C+pages+64%2D71%2E)
10. Agić, Željko and Aranzabe, Maria Jesus and Atutxa, Aitziber and Bosco, Cristina and Choi, Jinho and de Marneffe, Marie-Catherine and Dozat, Timothy and Farkas, Richárd and Foster, Jennifer and Ginter, Filip and Goenaga, Iakes and Gojenola, Koldo and Goldberg, Yoav and Hajič, Jan and Johannsen, Anders Trærup and Kanerva, Jenna and Kuokkala, Juha and Laippala, Veronika and Lenci, Alessandro and Lindén, Krister and Ljubešić, Nikola and Lynn, Teresa and Manning, Christopher and Martı́nez, Héctor Alonso and McDonald, Ryan and Missilä, Anna and Montemagni, Simonetta and Nivre, Joakim and Nurmi, Hanna and Osenova, Petya and Petrov, Slav and Piitulainen, Jussi and Plank, Barbara and Prokopidis, Prokopis and Pyysalo, Sampo and Seeker, Wolfgang and Seraji, Mojgan and Silveira, Natalia and Simi, Maria and Simov, Kiril and Smith, Aaron and Tsarfaty, Reut and Vincze, Veronika and Zeman, Daniel Universal Dependencies 1.1. 2015. [https://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/repository/xmlui/handle/11234/LRT-1478](https://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/repository/xmlui/handle/11234/LRT-1478) [↗](https://lindat.mff.cuni.cz/repository/xmlui/handle/11234/LRT-1478)
11. Universal Dependencies Universal Dependencies home page. 2015. [http://universaldependencies.github.io/docs/](http://universaldependencies.github.io/docs/) [↗](http://universaldependencies.github.io/docs/)