Universal Decompositional Semantics on Universal Dependencies

Abstract

We present a framework for augmenting data sets from the Universal Dependencies project with Universal Decompositional Semantics. Where the Universal Dependencies project aims to provide a syntactic annotation standard that can be used consistently across many languages as well as a collection of corpora that use that standard, our extension has similar aims for semantic annotation. We describe results from annotating the English Universal Dependencies treebank, dealing with word senses, semantic roles, and event properties.

Broad-Coverage Semantic Parsing as Transduction

“…Broad-coverage semantic parsing aims at mapping any natural language text, regardless of its domain, genre, or even the language itself, into a general-purpose meaning representation. As a long-standing topic of interest in computational linguistics, broad-coverage semantic parsing has targeted a number of meaning representation frameworks, including CCG (Steedman, 1996(Steedman, , 2001, DRS (Kamp and Reyle, 1993;Bos, 2008), AMR (Banarescu et al, 2013), UCCA (Abend and Rappoport, 2013), SDP (Oepen et al, 2014(Oepen et al, , 2015, and UDS (White et al, 2016). 1 Each of these frameworks has their specific formal and linguistic assumptions.…”

Decomposing Generalization: Models of Generic, Habitual, and Episodic Statements

“…This choice of axes is aimed at allowing our framework to capture not only the standard EPISODIC-HABITUAL-GENERIC distinction, but also phenomena that do not fit neatly into this distinction, such as taxonomic reference, abstract reference, and weak definites. The idea here is similar to prior decompositional semantics work on semantic protoroles (Reisinger et al, 2015;White et al, 2016White et al, , 2017, which associates categories like AGENT or PATIENT with sets of more basic properties, such as volitionality, causation, change-of-state, etc., and is similarly inspired by classic theoretical work (Dowty, 1991).…”

“…For instance, taxonomic reference, as in (5), and weak definites, as in (7), prototypically involve an argument being both particular-and kind-referring; stage-level properties, as in (8), prototypically involve particular, non-dynamic situations, while individuallevel properties, as in (9), prototypically involve non-particular, non-dynamic situations. Figure 1 shows examples of the argument protocol (top) and predicate protocol (bottom), whose implementation is based on the event factuality annotation protocol described by White et al (2016) and Rudinger et al (2018). Annotators are presented with a sentence with one or many words highlighted, followed by statements pertaining to the highlighted words in the context of the sentence.…”

“…Predicate and argument extraction We extracted predicates and their arguments from the gold UD parses from UD-EWT using PredPatt (White et al, 2016;Zhang et al, 2017b). From the UD-EWT training set, we then randomly sampled 100 arguments from those headed by a DET, NUM, NOUN, PROPN, or PRON and 100 predicates from those headed by a ADJ, NOUN, NUM, DET, PROPN, PRON, VERB, or AUX.…”

“…To remedy this, we propose a novel framework for capturing linguistic expressions of generalization. Taking inspiration from decompositional semantics (Reisinger et al, 2015;White et al, 2016), we suggest that linguistic expressions of generalization should be captured in a continuous multilabel system, rather than a multi-class system. We do this by decomposing categories such as EPISODIC, HABITUAL, and GENERIC into simple referential properties of predicates and their arguments.…”