Reflexive pronouns in Spanish Universal Dependencies: from annotation to automatic morphosyntactic analysis

Resumen

In this follow-up article of Degraeuwe and Goethals (2020), we present the annotation scheme used to reannotate the 7298 potentially reflexive pronouns included in the Universal Dependencies Spanish AnCora v2.6 treebank, which resulted in significant modifications for the “Case” feature (100% changed) and dependency relations (87% changed). Next, we evaluate the performance of spaCy v3.2.2 and Stanza v1.3.0 (both trained on AnCora v2.8, and thus based on our reannotations) on the AnCora v2.8 test set, which yielded weighted F1 scores up to 0.88 and 0.98 for the “Case” and “Reflex” features, respectively, and up to 0.71 for the dependency relations. Finally, the error analysis of the spaCy results underlines the (generalisation) potential of the model, but also reveals some of the remaining issues in the automatic morphosyntactic analysis of reflexive pronouns in Spanish, such as determining if expletive relations denote an impersonal, passive or inherently reflexive use.