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# Universal Dependencies v1: A Multilingual Treebank Collection

**Authors:** [Joakim Nivre](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/joakim-nivre/), [Marie-Catherine de Marneffe](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/marie-catherine-de-marneffe/), [Filip Ginter](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/filip-ginter/) et al. · **Year:** 2016 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L16-1262](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1262/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) (LREC proceedings) — summary only

[**1028** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2579343286) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**711** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/ud-2016-nivre-universal-dependencies-v1-multilingual-treebank/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/L16-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1262/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1262.pdf)
- [DOI 10.63317/2hnj7od8afy8](https://doi.org/10.63317/2hnj7od8afy8)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2579343286)

**Authors (12)**

1. [Joakim Nivre](https://openalex.org/A5077063699) h 60 · 16139 citations · 333 works
2. [Marie-Catherine de Marneffe](https://openalex.org/A5112862689) h 31 · 8612 citations · 82 works
3. [Filip Ginter](https://openalex.org/A5019929457) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5484-6103) · h 36 · 7535 citations · 202 works
4. [Yoav Goldberg](https://openalex.org/A5028476919) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6497-829X) · h 59 · 23282 citations · 401 works
5. [Jan Hajič](https://openalex.org/A5102738283) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3503-7730) · h 39 · 8442 citations · 278 works
6. [Christopher D. Manning](https://openalex.org/A5046006076) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6155-649X) · h 139 · 180101 citations · 770 works
7. [Ryan McDonald](https://openalex.org/A5022489655) h 48 · 16067 citations · 113 works
8. [Slav Petrov](https://openalex.org/A5062886906) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5505-4861) · h 39 · 15014 citations · 106 works
9. [Sampo Pyysalo](https://openalex.org/A5066925770) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6279-5000) · h 47 · 28686 citations · 178 works
10. [Natalia Silveira](https://openalex.org/A5113023938) h 7 · 1857 citations · 12 works
11. [Reut Tsarfaty](https://openalex.org/A5063283689) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6406-6568) · h 24 · 2832 citations · 217 works
12. [Daniel Zeman](https://openalex.org/A5061392927) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5791-6568) · h 27 · 4467 citations · 163 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 is the reference for the first UD release. It sets out the design principles: dependency-based and lexicalist annotation, the recoverability principle (every syntactic word must map back to the raw text), content words as the backbone of the tree with function words as dependents, and a closed inventory of 17 POS tags, the morphological features, and 40 relations. Language-specific subtypes such as `acl:relcl` may be added and can always be stripped to the core label. The v1.2 release (November 2015) has 37 treebanks in 33 languages, with statistics per treebank (sentences, tokens, lemmas, features, relations). The authors also describe the CoNLL-U format, the validation tools and the enhanced representation, which was then used by only one treebank (Finnish).

## Ideas

- I1. `en ud-eval` with recoverability: check that the tokens of every output sentence rejoin exactly to the raw text, using the SpaceAfter and MISC conventions of `en/src/tok.rs`; measure the share of sentences that fail on EWT test, which should be zero.
- I2. `en ud-eval` core-label score: strip the subtype after the colon from both gold and output and report LAS beside the full LAS, to show how much of the loss comes from subtyping (`acl:relcl`, `nmod:poss`); measure the difference on EWT test.
- I3. `treeagree` gates: check that auxiliaries and copulas depend on a lexical predicate, which is the paper's design rule; measure how often `aux` or `cop` arcs point the other way in silver trees, per 1k sentences, with `treeagree check`.
- I4. `en/src/udreg.rs`: the paper's 17 POS tags and 40 relations are the historical base of the registry; check that the registry gate accepts every relation and feature the `en` crate writes, and report any that only exist in the mova dialect.

## For Mova

Touches `languages/en/20-syntax-overview`, `10-word-classes`, `12-pronouns-determiners-numerals` and `13-verbs`, and the `en` crate (`udreg.rs`, `tok.rs`, `ud.rs`), `tools/treeagree` and the `mova` dialect ([The Mova dialect: a UD metadialect, treebanks, and converters](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/docs/dialect/)). This is a background paper: its numbers are the UD v1 baseline, not Mova targets. Measure first the recoverability check (I1), because it is cheap and it fails loudly.

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/) · [Part-of-speech tagging](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/part-of-speech-tagging/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.63317/2hnj7od8afy8](https://doi.org/10.63317/2hnj7od8afy8)

```
@inproceedings{nivre2016universal,
  title = {{Universal Dependencies v1: A Multilingual Treebank Collection}},
  author = {Nivre, Joakim and Marneffe, Marie-Catherine de and Ginter, Filip and Goldberg, Yoav and Hajič, Jan and Manning, Christopher D. and McDonald, Ryan and Petrov, Slav and Pyysalo, Sampo and Silveira, Natalia and Tsarfaty, Reut and Zeman, Daniel},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.63317/2hnj7od8afy8},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/2hnj7od8afy8}
}
```

- [← previous Converting an English-Swedish Parallel Treebank to Universal Dependencies](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ud-2015-ahrenberg-converting-english-swedish-parallel-treebank/)
- [next → Enhanced English Universal Dependencies: An Improved Representation for Natural Language Understanding Tasks](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ud-2016-schuster-enhanced-english-universal-dependencies-improved/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

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