Joint Workshop on Multiword Expressions and Universal Dependencies (MWE-UD 2024)

After independently running a successful series of workshops, the MWE and UD communities are now joining forces to organize a joint workshop. This is a timely collaboration because the two communities clearly have overlapping interests. For instance, while UD has several dependency relations that can be used to annotate MWEs, both annotation guidelines (i.e. is syntactic irregularity and inflexibility or semantic non-compositionality the leading criterion?) and annotation practice (both across treebanks for a single language and across languages) for these relations can be improved (Schneider and Zeldes, 2021). The PARSEME MWE-annotated corpora for 26 languages build on UD annotated corpora (Savary et al., 2023). Both communities share an interest in developing guidelines, data-sets, and tools that can be applied to a wide range of typologically diverse languages, raising fundamental questions about tokenization, lemmatization, and morphological decomposition of tokens. Proposals for harmonizing annotation practice between what has been achieved in PARSEME and UD and expanding PARSEME MWE annotation to non-verbal MWEs are also central to the recently started UniDive COST action (CA21167).