Adaptation of universal dependencies to specific grammars: The case of Persian dependency grammar

Universal Dependencies is the latest standard annotation scheme available, aiming at cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation. It has already been adapted to a large number of languages including Persian. The trend, however, has been to take into account the original principles of dependency grammar rather than a description of the specific language in dependency terms. This paper reports an attempt to adapt Universal Dependencies to form a scheme for annotation of Persian dependency structure based on a comprehensive description of Persian syntax according to a theory introduced as the Autonomous Phrases Theory. The main idea there is that the significance of phrases should be appreciated in dependency analyses due to their cognitive reality, and the notion of valency is also extended beyond verbs. On that basis, every dependent of whatever head type is classified as either a complement or an adjunct depending on whether or not it plays a role in the valency structure of the head. A tagset was proposed consisting of fifty-three dependency relations, including fifteen original labels and the rest borrowed from the universal dependencies.