# Treebanking User-Generated Content: a UD Based Overview of Guidelines, Corpora and Unified Recommendations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.02063 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02063/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

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- [Noisy UGC Translation at the Character Level: Revisiting Open-Vocabulary Capabilities and Robustness of Char-Based Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12552/) (2021)
- [Are UD Treebanks Getting More Consistent? A Report Card for English UD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00636/) (2023)
- [Enriching the NArabizi Treebank: A Multifaceted Approach to Supporting an Under-Resourced Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14866/) (2023)
- [Cross-linguistically Consistent Semantic and Syntactic Annotation of Child-directed Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.10952/) (2021)
- [Understanding the Impact of UGC Specificities on Translation Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12551/) (2021)
- [Lost in Speech: Benchmarking, Evaluation, and Parsing of Spoken Bilingual Conversational Language Beyond Standard UD Assumptions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06307/) (2026)
- [Coconstructions in spoken data: UD annotation guidelines and first results](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28261/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This article presents a discussion on the main linguistic phenomena which cause difficulties in the analysis of user-generated texts found on the web and in social media, and proposes a set of annotation guidelines for their treatment within the Universal Dependencies (UD) framework of syntactic analysis. Given on the one hand the increasing number of treebanks featuring user-generated content, and its somewhat inconsistent treatment in these resources on the other, the aim of this article is twofold: (1) to provide a condensed, though comprehensive, overview of such treebanks -- based on available literature -- along with their main features and a comparative analysis of their annotation criteria, and (2) to propose a set of tentative UD-based annotation guidelines, to promote consistent treatment of the particular phenomena found in these types of texts. The overarching goal of this article is to provide a common framework for researchers interested in developing similar resources in UD, thus promoting cross-linguistic consistency, which is a principle that has always been central to the spirit of UD.