# Annotating Korean adnominal ending constructions in corpus data: Beyond relative-clause identification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.03681 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.03681/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 3 of its 20 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [KLUE: Korean Language Understanding Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09680/) (2021)
- [K-UniMorph: Korean Universal Morphology and its Feature Schema](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06335/) (2023)
- [K-UD: Revising Korean Universal Dependencies Guidelines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.00856/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The Korean adnominal ending textttETM occurs in diverse noun-modifying constructions, including relative-clause-like modifiers, adjectival and copular forms, bound-noun constructions, and lexicalized expressions. This paper argues that textttETM is not a direct marker of relative-clause structure, but a morphological exponent shared by several adnominal constructions. We propose a corpus-based typology that distinguishes these constructions using predicate type, auxiliary structure, argument-structural compatibility, head-noun restriction, and lexicalized patterns. We operationalize the typology as a construction-sensitive annotation layer for the KLUE dependency treebank, implemented through an ordered rule-based procedure and evaluated by manual validation. Productive relative-clause-like uses account for 39.4% of the analyzed instances; the remainder consists mainly of adjectival, copular, bound-nominal, modal, temporal, and collocational constructions. The findings show that Korean relative-clause-like modification cannot be identified from adnominal morphology alone.