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# How useful are Enhanced Universal Dependencies for semantic interpretation?

**Authors:** Jamie Y. Findlay, Dag T. T. Haug · **Year:** 2021 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2021) **Link:** [aclanthology.org/2021.depling-1.3](https://aclanthology.org/2021.depling-1.3/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[**0** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W7057131055) openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14[**4** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/ud-2021-findlay-how-useful-are-enhanced-universal/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2021)](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2021.depling-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2021.depling-1.3/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2021.depling-1.3.pdf)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7057131055)

**Authors (2)**

1. [Jamie Y. Findlay](https://openalex.org/A5083263216) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7700-1525) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2270443066) · h 4 · 171 citations · 20 works
2. Dag T. T. Haug [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/2265180958)

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 authors ask whether Enhanced UD gives the information that predicate-argument structure needs. They go through the six enhancement types in the UD guidelines (propagated conjuncts, controlled subjects, relative-clause antecedents and others) and check how they are annotated. Only 31 treebanks have any useful enhanced annotation, and only 4 of them are English. The annotations are often inconsistent and produced by limited automatic processes with little manual checking. The authors conclude that the enhancements are needed for correct predicate-argument structure, but that coverage and quality are the two limits, and that coordination propagation may need manual work to fix.

## Ideas

- I1. `world` frames: build the propagated-conjunct and controlled-subject relations from the basic tree in Rust (`en/src/ud.rs` pass), and measure the share of predicate-argument pairs they add on EWT dev, as the gain of the enhanced layer.
- I2. A consistency gate: count enhanced-edge violations of the UD guidelines in the `mova` dialect treebanks (`treebanks/en/`) per 1k sentences, in the style of `treeagree check`.
- I3. Quality audit: sample 100 enhanced edges from EWT and classify them as correct, wrong or missing, the manual check the paper calls for, as a fixed test before the derived layer is trusted.

## For Mova

Enhanced UD is a derived layer in Mova, and this paper shows that existing enhanced data is thin in English, so Mova's own rules must produce the relations. The consistency gate is a cheap check that fits `treeagree`. Relevant chapters are `languages/en/24-coordination-subordination`, `23-complementation`, `25-relative-clauses` and `28-voice-and-passive`. Measure first the enhanced-edge violation rate of the `mova` dialect treebanks, before any new rule.

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/) · [Semantic role labeling](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/semantic-role-labeling/)

## Cite

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

```
@inproceedings{findlay2021how,
  title = {{How useful are Enhanced Universal Dependencies for semantic interpretation?}},
  author = {Findlay, Jamie Y. and Haug, Dag T. T.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2021)},
  year = {2021},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2021.depling-1.3/}
}
```

- [← previous From Raw Text to Enhanced Universal Dependencies: The Parsing Shared Task at IWPT 2021](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ud-2021-bouma-raw-text-enhanced-universal-dependencies/)
- [next → Graph Rewriting for Enhanced Universal Dependencies](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/ud-2021-guillaume-graph-rewriting-enhanced-universal-dependencies/)
- [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/)

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