Universal Dependencies (UD) is a project that is developing cross-linguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning, and parsing research from a language typology perspective. The annotation scheme is based on an evolution of (universal) Stanford dependencies (de Marneffe et al., 2006, 2008, 2014), Google universal part-of-speech tags (Petrov et al., 2012), and the Interset interlingua for morphosyntactic tagsets (Zeman, 2008). The general philosophy is to provide a universal inventory of categories and guidelines to facilitate consistent annotation of similar constructions across languages, while allowing language-specific extensions when necessary.

ÚFAL researchers Dan Zeman and Jan Hajič are active members of the core UD group. UD can be seen as a follow-up of several ÚFAL-led initiatives, besides Interset also the HamleDT project.

For further information and documentation see the UD website at http://universaldependencies.org/.