Abstract
This monograph presents a comparative study of annotation approaches to morphology and syntax of natural languages, with emphasis on applicability in a multilingual environment. Annotation is understood as adding linguistic categories and relations to digitally encoded natural language text, resulting in annotated corpus; as syntactic relations are often represented in the form of dependency trees, the annotated corpora covered by the monograph are dependency treebanks.
Many treebanks exist and their annotation styles vary significantly, which hampers their usefulness for linguists and language engineers. We survey several harmonization efforts that tried to come up with cross-linguistically applicable annotation guidelines, including the most recent and broadest effort to date, Universal Dependencies.
We examine language description on three levels: 1. tokenization and word segmentation, 2. morphology, and 3. surface dependency syntax. For each language phenomenon we provide a comparison of its analy