Universal Dependencies to Logical Forms with Negation Scope
This addresses the need for better semantic representation in language technology applications, though it is incremental as it builds on an existing framework.
The paper tackled the problem of representing negation scope in logical forms from Universal Dependencies, resulting in UDepLambda¬, which handles complex phenomena like universal quantifiers with promising initial conversion for English.
Many language technology applications would benefit from the ability to represent negation and its scope on top of widely-used linguistic resources. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of obtaining a first-order logic representation with negation scope marked using Universal Dependencies. To do so, we enhance UDepLambda, a framework that converts dependency graphs to logical forms. The resulting UDepLambda$\lnot$ is able to handle phenomena related to scope by means of an higher-order type theory, relevant not only to negation but also to universal quantification and other complex semantic phenomena. The initial conversion we did for English is promising, in that one can represent the scope of negation also in the presence of more complex phenomena such as universal quantifiers.