UD for French 
Tokenization and Word Segmentation
- In general, words are delimited by whitespace characters and punctuations are considered as separated words.
- Only numbers can contain spaces (following
[0-9 ,]+regexp). - There are several closed classes of contractions that are treated as multi-word tokens and segmented to individual syntactic words.
For instance,
au->à+le,auquel->de+lequel. Note thatduanddesare ambiguous and can be split or not depending of their usage.
For more details, see tokenization.
Morphology
Tags
This is an overview only. For more detailed discussion and examples, see the list of French POS tags and French features.
- French uses all 17 universal POS categories, including particles (PART). PART is used differently among treebanks. Most common usages are for euphonic element (like t in a-t-il) or for -là and -ci when they follow a pronoun (celle-là) or a noun (cette fois-ci). Some corpora uses PART for negation words ne and pas.
- Most French corpora has just three auxiliary verb (AUX)
- être (to be) is used as a copule, as a tense auxiliary and as a passive auxiliary,
- avoir (to have) is used as a tense auxiliary,
- faire (to make) is used in causative constructions.
- UD_French-ParTUT uses a few more auxiliaries (aller, devoir, pouvoir, …).
Features
- TODO (see French features).
Instruction: Describe inherent and inflectional features for major word classes (at least NOUN and VERB). Describe other noteworthy features. Include links to language-specific feature definitions if any.
Syntax
- TODO (see French relations).
Instruction: Give criteria for identifying core arguments (subjects and objects), and describe the range of copula constructions in nonverbal clauses. List all subtype relations used. Include links to language-specific relations definitions if any.
Treebanks
There are six French UD treebanks: