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# Enhanced English Universal Dependencies: An Improved Representation for Natural Language Understanding Tasks

**Authors:** [Sebastian Schuster](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/sebastian-schuster/), [Christopher D. Manning](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/authors/christopher-d-manning/) · **Year:** 2016 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/L16-1376](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1376/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) (LREC proceedings) — summary only

[**224** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W2571842322) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**111** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/ud-2016-schuster-enhanced-english-universal-dependencies-improved/) 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/L16-1376/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/L16-1376.pdf)
- [DOI 10.63317/3fjxjut9audq](https://doi.org/10.63317/3fjxjut9audq)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2571842322)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Sebastian Schuster](https://openalex.org/A5018467280) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8066-0142) · h 16 · 2524 citations · 48 works
2. [Christopher D. Manning](https://openalex.org/A5046006076) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6155-649X) · h 139 · 180101 citations · 770 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

Shallow understanding tasks such as relation extraction need direct links between content words, which a strict basic tree lacks: in "Fred started to laugh" the controlled verb has no subject edge. The authors define an enhanced English UD graph that keeps all basic relations and adds controlled subjects, propagated conjuncts, augmented relation names with the preposition (nmod:in), and augmented conjunctions. Their enhanced++ graph goes further and may delete basic edges, to treat partitives ("both of the girls") and multiword prepositions ("in front of") as one head with a quantifier or a flat expression, and to copy conjoined prepositions. They also give a constituency-to-basic-UD converter, which on EWT v1.1 reaches LAS 92.6, UAS 96.1 and accuracy 93.9 over the whole corpus, with the lowest scores on email signatures and on learner-written reviews and questions. The limits they name are the controlled quantifier case ("Everybody wants to buy a house") and distributive readings of conjoined subjects.

## Ideas

- I1. `en/src/convert.rs` or a new enhancement pass: add the enhanced UD edges (controlled subject, propagated conjunct, relation with preposition) as a derived layer in MISC; measure the relation-extraction F1 of `prag` on EWT test with the basic tree and with the enhanced layer.
- I2. Enhanced++ partitive and multiword-preposition rules, with the expression lists in `en/seeds/lexicon`; measure the share of `nmod` and `det` arcs in EWT test that change, and the triple precision on 100 sampled sentences checked by hand.
- I3. `en/src/parse.rs` wh-attachment: a feature for the wh-word that tests the verb's selectional frame, which the paper uses to attach "what" to the embedded verb; measure LAS on wh-questions of EWT test, twice for determinism.
- I4. `en/src/convert.rs`: report LAS per genre against EWT v1.1 in the same layout as the paper's table; this is the baseline for every change to the converter.

## For Mova

Touches `languages/en/22-phrases`, `23-complementation`, `24-coordination-subordination`, `25-relative-clauses` and `26-questions`, and the `en` crate (`convert.rs`, `parse.rs`, `lin.rs` for the reverse direction) and the `world`/`prag` relation builder. The enhanced layer belongs in MISC, since the Mova dialect keeps the basic tree fixed. Measure first the `prag` relation-extraction F1 with and without enhanced edges.

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

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.63317/3fjxjut9audq](https://doi.org/10.63317/3fjxjut9audq)

```
@inproceedings{schuster2016enhanced,
  title = {{Enhanced English Universal Dependencies: An Improved Representation for Natural Language Understanding Tasks}},
  author = {Schuster, Sebastian and Manning, Christopher D.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)},
  year = {2016},
  doi = {10.63317/3fjxjut9audq},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3fjxjut9audq}
}
```

- [← previous Universal Dependencies v1: A Multilingual Treebank Collection](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ud-2016-nivre-universal-dependencies-v1-multilingual-treebank/)
- [next → UDPipe: Trainable Pipeline for Processing CoNLL-U Files Performing Tokenization, Morphological Analysis, POS Tagging and Parsing](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ud-2016-straka-udpipe-trainable-pipeline-processing-conll/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

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