Character-level Annotation for Chinese Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies

This paper presents a new schema to annotate Chinese Treebanks on the character level. The original Universal Dependencies (UD) and Surface-Syntactic Universal Dependencies (SUD) projects provide token-level resources with rich morphosyntactic language details. However, without any commonly accepted word definition for Chinese, the dependency parsing always faces the dilemma of word segmentation. Therefore we present a character-level annotation schema integrated into the existing Universal Dependencies schema as an extension.