# UCxn: Typologically Informed Annotation of Constructions Atop Universal Dependencies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17748 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17748/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Universal Dependencies v2: An Evergrowing Multilingual Treebank Collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10643/) (2020)
- [The Better Your Syntax, the Better Your Semantics? Probing Pretrained Language Models for the English Comparative Correlative](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.13181/) (2022)
- [A Discerning Several Thousand Judgments: GPT-3 Rates the Article + Adjective + Numeral + Noun Construction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12564/) (2023)
- [Treebanking User-Generated Content: a UD Based Overview of Guidelines, Corpora and Unified Recommendations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02063/) (2020)
- [Construction Grammar Provides Unique Insight into Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.02178/) (2023)
- [A Second Wave of UD Hebrew Treebanking and Cross-Domain Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.07873/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Beyond Memorization: Assessing Semantic Generalization in Large Language Models Using Phrasal Constructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.04661/) (2025)
- [Construction Identification and Disambiguation Using BERT: A Case Study of NPN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18751/) (2025)
- [Annotating Constructions with UD: the experience of the Italian Constructicon](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07623/) (2024)
- [PyFCG: Fluid Construction Grammar in Python](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12920/) (2025)
- [A Method for Learning Large-Scale Computational Construction Grammars from Semantically Annotated Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12754/) (2026)
- [CAIT: A Syntactic Parsing Toolkit for Child-Adult InTeractions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.19718/) (2026)
- [Model Collapse as Cultural Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23054/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Universal Dependencies (UD) project has created an invaluable collection of treebanks with contributions in over 140 languages. However, the UD annotations do not tell the full story. Grammatical constructions that convey meaning through a particular combination of several morphosyntactic elements -- for example, interrogative sentences with special markers and/or word orders -- are not labeled holistically. We argue for (i) augmenting UD annotations with a 'UCxn' annotation layer for such meaning-bearing grammatical constructions, and (ii) approaching this in a typologically informed way so that morphosyntactic strategies can be compared across languages. As a case study, we consider five construction families in ten languages, identifying instances of each construction in UD treebanks through the use of morphosyntactic patterns. In addition to findings regarding these particular constructions, our study yields important insights on methodology for describing and identifying constructions in language-general and language-particular ways, and lays the foundation for future constructional enrichment of UD treebanks.