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Release checklist

This checklist is meant to provide guidance for teams contributing treebank data for a new release of Universal Dependencies. It was created for release v1.2 and applies, unless otherwise noted, to any upcoming release.

Contents:

Executive summary

Repository and files

Every language has its own GitHub repository called UD_Language, where Language is the name of the language. For example, the repository for Finnish is called UD_Finnish. Make sure to create the repository for your language if it does not already exist.

Every language repository should contain the following five files (where xx is the ISO code for the given language):

  1. xx-ud-train.conllu
  2. xx-ud-dev.conllu
  3. xx-ud-test.conllu
  4. README.txt or README.md
  5. LICENSE.txt

The first three files contain the treebank data split into a training, development and test set. These should be in CONLL-U format and conform to the universal guidelines. They need to be validated as described below. The README.txt file contains basic documentation of the treebank and machine-readable metadata for the UD main page (see below) and the LICENSE.txt specifies under what license the treebank is made available.

The README file should minimally contain the following information:

  1. A description of the treebank and its origin (creation method, data sources, etc.)
  2. A description of how the data was split into training, development and test sets
  3. Basic statistics about number of sentences, tokens, etc.
  4. Acknowledgments and references that should be cited when using the treebank
  5. A machine-readable section with language metadata. This is described [here](

Note that the basic statistics can be produced using the script conllu-stats.pyavailable from the tools repository and run as follows:

$ python conllu-stats.py --stats ../UD_Finnish/*.conllu

For previously released corpora, the README file should also include a “changelog” section summarizing changes between versions e.g. as follows

``` Changelog

2015-05-15 v1.1

* Added lemmas

* Corrected tokenization in sentences 123 and 456 ```

Language metadata

The readme file contains metadata used to generate the overview table on the UD main page: data source, license, genres, and documentation status. The format of this metadata is described here

The table on the front page is automatically generated from special lines in the README.txt or README.md file for every language. This means that in order to add a new language, also its repository must be created, minimally with the readme file. Here is an example of the language metadata block from the Finnish README file

Documentation status: complete
Data source: semi-automatic
Data available since: UD v1.0
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
Genre: blog wiki legal news fiction
Contributors: Ginter, Filip; Kanerva, Jenna; Laippala, Veronika; Missilä, Anna; Pyysalo, Sampo

This block can be anywhere in the readme file. The properties are as follows:

Repository branches

While the official UD release is always through Lindat, many users of UD source their data from the GitHub language repositories. Therefore, the master branch of every language should contain the last, officially released version of the data for the given language. The development in between releases should happen on the dev branch of the repository.

Validation

Data format and repository

Up-to-date automatic validation runs of the repositories are available here. These are based on the dev branch of the data and use the validate.py script described below.

The final data validation is an important step and each file released in the project is expected to validate as conforming to the basic requirements on the data and format. For this purpose, there is a validation script in the tools repository.

$ git clone git@github.com:UniversalDependencies/tools.git
$ cd tools
$ python validate.py -h

In general, you validate the data like so:

python validate.py --lang=xx [file.conllu]

for example for Finnish:

$ python validate.py --lang=fi ../UD_Finnish/fi-ud-dev.conllu 
*** PASSED ***

Among other items, the script also validates the language-specific set of tags and relations and therefore it needs to know about these. The language-specific lists are stored in data/deprel.xx (language-specific relations) and data/feat_val.xx (language-specific features). In addition data/*.ud stores the UD taglists. Before you can validate data for a given language, you need to produce and commit the necessary tag lists. You can make the initial lists like so:

$ python conllu-stats.py --deprels=langspec path_to_your_data/*.conllu > data/deprel.xx
$ python conllu-stats.py --catvals=langspec path_to_your_data/*.conllu > data/feat_val.xx

This will gather the language-specific lists in descending order by their frequency. It is important to check the resulting files for correctness, because otherwise the validation would of course be a no-op. Once you have checked the lists manually, you can add them to the repository:

$ git add data/deprel.xx data/feat_val.xx
$ git commit -m "Adding language-specific data for xx."
$ git push

Syntax

For the v1.3 release, we have created an additional number of tests which try to uncover possible logical inconsistencies in the treebank data. Automatic validation runs for this syntax validation are available here. Unlike the data format and repository validation, this validation machinery is not streamlined enough to be distributed for offline use, therefore it is important to regularly push your data to the dev branch of the repository.

The tests are specified in the file gen_index/stests.yaml and rely on the query language of the SETS search interface.

Language-specific guidelines

Every treebank should be accompanied by a set of language-specific guidelines at http://universaldependencies.org/. These guidelines should minimally specify the following:

  1. Tokenization: How was word segmentation performed? Does the treebank include multiword tokens?
  2. POS tags: What universal POS tags (if any) are not used?
  3. Features: What universal features are not used? What language-specific features/values have been added?
  4. Relations: What universal relations are not used? What language-specific subtypes have been added?

There are more detailed guidelines for language-specific documentation. Also see the general guidelines about how to contribute.