In recent years, there has been substantial interest in annotation schemes that apply consistently to many languages. Building on several recent proposals that have aimed to unify morphological and syntactic annotation, the Universal Dependencies (UD) project seeks to introduce a cross-linguistically applicable part-of- speech tagset, feature inventory, and set of dependency relations as well as a large number of uniformly annotated treebanks. In this paper, we present Universal Dependencies for Finnish, one of the ten languages in the recent first release of UD project treebank data. We detail the mapping of previously introduced annotation to the UD standard, describing a number of specific challenges and their resolution. We additionally present a first set of dependency parsing experiments comparing the performance of a state-of-the-art parser trained on a language-specific annotation schema to performance on the corresponding UD annotation. The parsing results show improvement in parsing scores compared to the source annotation, indicating that the conversion is accurate and supporting the feasibility of UD as a parsing target.
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